Constance lived because she never puts sugar on her berries, and the arsenic was in the sugar. Mary Katherine lived because she'd been sent to bed that night without her supper. Mary Katherine Blackwood, or 'Merricat' as her older sister Constance calls her, is eighteen but acts more like she's twelve, which is how old she was when everyone else in her family except Constance and Uncle Julian sat down one day to dinner and died hours later of arsenic poisoning. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. 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 am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. We Have Always Lived in the Castle has a very straightforward plot and the 'twist' is fairly predictable, being narrated the way it is, but because it's narrated the way it is, the plot is not the most important thing. Stephen King certainly was, and Jackson's cold, spooky New England settings with friendly folks whose faces are a seething mask of malice and resentment would fit right in in King territory.

LeGuin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (go read that, too) and Stephen King's The Long Walk, so one might say that even Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games was influenced second-hand by Shirley Jackson. She's most famous for The Haunting of Hill House, but probably the quintessential Shirley Jackson tale is The Lottery, a short story which you should go read right now. Shirley Jackson wrote creepy psychological novels and short stories and should have been more famous. Unable to drive him away by either polite or occult means, Merricat adopts more desperate methods, resulting in crisis, tragedy, and the revelation of a terrible secret. But one day a stranger arrives-cousin Charles, with his eye on the Blackwood fortune-and manages to penetrate into their carefully shielded lives. Merricat has developed an idiosyncratic system of rules and protective magic to guard the estate against intrusions from hostile villagers. Six years after four family members died of arsenic poisoning, the three remaining Blackwoods-elder, agoraphobic sister Constance wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian and 18-year-old Mary Katherine, or, Merricat-live together in pleasant isolation. Inverarity American gothic: it's always the quiet ones.

We have always lived in the castle book