Recommendations
Books Like We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Best books to read after We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
We Have Always Lived in the Castle creates a complete world from isolation, ritual, and the gothic logic of the outsider. These 8 books share its enclosed female perspective, its dark humor in the face of threat, and its sympathy for those whom society has deemed monstrous.
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The Haunting of Hill House
by Shirley Jackson
Jackson's 1959 horror novel — widely considered the greatest haunted house story in English — shares We Have Always Lived in the Castle's female gothic sensibility, its portrait of a woman whose interior life is at odds with social expectation, and its ambiguity about whether the supernatural is real or a projection of psychological distress.
- 2Buy
Her Body and Other Parties
by Carmen Maria Machado
Machado's 2017 story collection uses horror and fairy tale conventions to explore female embodiment and danger — including 'The Husband Stitch,' a feminist retelling of a campfire horror story about bodily control — and is the most direct contemporary heir to Jackson's project of feminist Gothic fiction.
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Mexican Gothic
by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
Moreno-Garcia's 2020 novel — set in 1950s Mexico, following Noemí Taboada to a crumbling estate to rescue her cousin from an oppressive family — is a direct homage to Jackson, using the Gothic house-as-trap structure of We Have Always Lived in the Castle to examine colonial violence and female power in a Mexican context.
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Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier
Du Maurier's 1938 Gothic novel — in which an unnamed young woman marries a widower and is haunted by his dead first wife — is the essential predecessor to Jackson in the English Gothic tradition: the same enclosed house, the same female protagonist navigating a world of implied menace, the same ambiguity about whether the threat is real or psychological.
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The Secret History
by Donna Tartt
Tartt's 1992 debut novel — in which a group of classics students at a Vermont college commits a murder that their obsessive intellectual world has made inevitable — shares We Have Always Lived in the Castle's portrait of a self-enclosed world with its own logic and morality, and its narrator's simultaneous participation in and detachment from the crimes at its center.
- 6Buy
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
Clarke's 2020 novel — narrated by a man living alone in a vast house of endless halls and flooding tides, faithfully cataloguing the statues and tides and keeping house for a god — has the same quality as We Have Always Lived in the Castle: a narrator making complete sense of an impossible world, the domestic rituals of a person who has rebuilt reality around their isolation.
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The Virgin Suicides
by Jeffrey Eugenides
Eugenides's 1993 debut novel about five sisters in suburban Michigan who die by suicide — narrated by the neighborhood boys who observed them from a distance and can never understand them — shares We Have Always Lived in the Castle's portrait of sisters in an enclosed domestic space, observed by an outside world that cannot comprehend them.
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White is for Witching
by Helen Oyeyemi
Oyeyemi's 2009 novel — about a house with a malevolent will in Dover, England, and the family it controls — is among the most direct literary heirs to Jackson's Gothic vision: the house as character, the female protagonist as both subject and object of the house's power, and the same ambiguity about what is real and what is the house's doing.
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