William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" is widely taught because it's such a fascinating and complex collection of literary maneuvers in a small space.

We get the story of Emily Grierson, an upper class social exile who does some very weird things. Obviously I wanted to read it after We Have Always Lived in the Castle due to the major overlaps. But this story also features an unreliable first person plural narrator. So strange! They're unable to connect some very clearly linked dots A, B, and C, so how much can we trust anything else they say?

It's great fun to watch a class go from "we hate Emily, like the townspeople" to maybe wondering whether she might be the way she is because of how they treat her. Surely being treated like a freak show who's outside of all the norms can't be good for someone?

This week's episode brought to you by incredibly itchy black fly bites, the barks of Miss Tallulah Dog, too much drama, unspecified, and major progress on the draft of The Esker Road. Woohoo!

Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle raises questions like: what if my little sister was a murderous psychopath? And: how burned down does a house have to be before we’ll move out? And: Why do the villagers hate our family so much?

The last question is because of the first one, really. Merricat poisoned most of her family and killed them. It’s not even really clear why. Because she got sent to bed without any supper? What had she done? None of that matters because Merricat is the narrator so we see what she sees. She hates and fears the villagers because they hate and fear her. She loves Constance, her older sister, who doesn’t like sugar on blackberries and so did not get poisoned, and Uncle Julian, who only got poisoned a little, so is stuck in a wheelchair with his mind wandering.

It’s Cousin Charles she hates the most. He comes sniffing around after the family money and after Constance. Merricat wrecks his room, and when he sends her to bed without any supper, she drops the lit pipe he left upstairs into a wastepaper basket full of newspapers, setting the house on fire, burning the upper floor, but getting rid of Charles, so it was worth it.

Jackson excels at letting people’s secret savagery out. She gives us incredibly nosy and inappropriate visitors, outrageously rude villagers, a fire chief who puts the fire out then throws a rock and smashes a window in the house he just saved, a raging mob of villagers who smash and destroy everything in the house they can get their hands on. But most of all she gives us Merricat, who calmly says that she wishes these people were dead—and that she would walk on their bodies.

What if we said what we actually thought and acted on our real feelings? What if we stopped being civilized?

This is a huge book to tackle and I still don’t know quite how to feel about it. I love an unreliable narrator so much, especially a true psychopath. And I love a Gothic house and a town that loses control of itself.

Other texts mentioned: The Esker Road, of course. The Last Word. Summerlands. Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland. I thought about Laurie Halse Anderson’s novels, especially Speak. Judy Blume’s novels. Lois Duncan. It’s no wonder therapists say that most of their job is getting people to say the things that need to be said.

I adore this book, then I got all mad at the ending, then when I went over it again, I had misread it—the ending is exactly right. Hurray!

Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle is overtly a retelling of Pride and Prejudice except instead of being about either of those things, it’s about genteel poverty and what it’s okay to do to get out of it.

The poverty is no joke in this book. Get ready to appreciate your fridge and pantry, as well as electricity and hot and cold running water. And that closet full of clothes. The characters deal with it, but aren’t about that, really, any more than the Bennets are about being on the edge of homelessness at any moment, if anything happens to Mr. Bennet. It’s huge and central to their lives, but they are about so much more.

Cassandra is one of literature’s best characters. The book is her journals about the time when “Pemberley is let at last,” as they actually joke in the book. Two eligible wealthy young men move into the neighborhood. They actually own the house and castle where Cassandra and her family are failing to pay the rent and going cold and hungry. Quite a setup.

Cassandra’s voice and interpretations of events are what make this a fabulous book.

Other topics broached: We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the podcast Do You Need a Ride?, The Last Word, Castle Full of Trees, probably others.