July: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

2020 is halfway over! Hooray! We’ll be posting our episode on The Murder of Roger Ackroyd very soon, but we wanted you to know exactly what we’ll be reading in July so you can get a head start. Last year, we covered young adult fiction in July. This year, we’re switching it up a little and going with another classic horror book: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson.

Description: Shirley Jackson’s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family’s dark secret.

Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. 

Above description from Penguin Random House

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise, I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead…

Above description and photo courtesy of Goodreads