We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
The narrator introduces herself in the first paragraph, and by the end of it you already know you cannot trust a word she says. Her name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. She is eighteen. She believes that with a little more luck she might have been born a werewolf, since the two middle fingers on each of her hands are the same length. And she is fond of her sister Constance, of Richard Plantagenet, and of the death cap mushroom. Everyone else in her family, she mentions, is dead. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson has one of the most famous openings in American fiction, and it earns that reputation by doing everything at once: it is funny, it is sinister, and it tells you the shape of the whole book while appearing to tell you nothing. The premise is laid out within the first chapters. Six years ago, arsenic in the sugar bowl killed four members of the Blackwood family at dinner. Constance, who cooked the meal and took no sugar …
