Shirley Jackson , _We Have Always Lived in the Castle_

MY MOTHER respected, even reverenced, canonical literature. For Christmases and birthdays, once it turned out I liked to read, I routinely got King Arthur, Sherlock Holmes, Kipling, Poe, Twain, and so on. Her favorite sort of thing to read, though, was spooky suspense, contemporary gothic, like Rebecca and this--and by "this" I mean not just We Have Always Lived in the Castle but this very copy beside me, the Popular Library paperback, costing sixty cents, with its dark blue background and a raven-tressed young woman peering through a hole in a fencepost.

The novel is narrated by Mary Katherine Blackwood, "Merricat," an 18-year-old who lives with her slightly older sister, Constance, and a decrepit uncle in an old house in a small New England town. Their relations with their neighbors are distant, not to say fraught, because the sisters' parents died suddenly and mysteriously six years ago; Constance is suspected, but Merricat soon strikes the reader as the likelier culprit. People tend to leave them alone, which is just the way Merricat likes it.

Crisis arrives with Cousin Julian, who is looking to help out the sisters, or perhaps just locate the tidy sum of cash rumored to have been left on the premises by the deceased parents. Merricat is equal to the occasion, though, and finds a means to drive him off--a means that unfortunately also allows the neighbors to vandalize and plunder the house--and Constance and Merricat are left just with each other at story's end, to the apparent satisfaction of both, even though the house is a giant step closer to being the gingerbread Victorian ruin you suspect it always wanted to be.

Jackson is a canonical figure herself, these days--reprinted in the Library of America and a run of Penguins. When genre fiction becomes canonical, how does that happen? Does the greatness of We Have Always Lived in the Castle--I'm willing to grant, by the way, that great it is--lie in its transcendence of its genre or in its unusually skillful fulfillment of its genre? Is it great despite being a gothic horror novel, or because it so quintessentially is a gothic horror novel?

May have to think this through a bit more.