Shirley

For all her mastery of horror, author Shirley Jackson had a flair for arch humour that bordered on the camp. Her slender 1962 page-turner ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ ends on an exchange between the Blackwood sisters that shows a deep irreverence for the macabre events that came before, and leaves the reader smiling ruefully.

There are similar tonal values to Josephine Decker’s , an adaptation of Susan Scarf Merrell’s semi-fictional novel of the same name. Elisabeth Moss channels a ghoulish pantomime energy in the title role that, from an actress is not so much the writer Shirley Jackson as it is a concocted psychodrama infused by the qualities of her work, where the real and the imagined co-exist in queasy disharmony, and women escape male dominance through use of an invented secret language.