Natalie Waite, seventeen years old, from a reasonably well-off family, is preparing to leave for college at the start of this novel. Over the course of several months, we follow her as she moves into a new phase of her life, gradually makes new friends, and starts to become an adult. Except of course it’s a Shirley Jackson novel, and none of that is what actually happens.
This is an unsettling little book that resists categorization. I guess…coming-of-age suspense novel with witchy undertones? The protagonist, Merricat, lives in her family’s ancestral home with her sister and her uncle. It’s clear that someone in the family is a murderer, but no one in the family seems uneasy about that prospect. Things come to a head when an external force comes into the house. It’s kind of like that other castle novel, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, except that as well as delightful, it’s also kind of creepy.
Fun fact: when Shirley Jackson’s first story, The Lottery, appeared in the New Yorker in 1948, she received so much hate mail in response that the local postmaster stopped speaking to her; thus possibly proving that Twitter didn’t create jerks, just enable them.