OK the reason I have not read much Shirley Jackson - and I realize this is a stupid reasin, but see above about clinging to the pointless stuff anyway - is that I spent a large part of my childhood thinking The Haunting of Hill House and The House of Dies Drear were the same book - if you look at the first edition covers on Wikipedia I feel I am justified - and thus am always slighly disappointed to be reminded it is *not* a groundbreaking use of Gothic tropes by an African-American author exploring Black history in America.

Meanwhile I also can't tell apart We Have Always Lived In The Castle, I Capture The Castle, and The Man In The High Castle, and am thus convinced it's a charmingly Austenesque coming-of-age tale about sisters who live in a castle with their dysfunctional guardians in an alternate England where Hitler won the war, and on being greeted with the real thing, again, disappointment.

(I also always have to think twice to te the difference between The Lottery and The Most Dangerous Game.)

No other single author gives me that much trouble, so I have to assume she is targeting me, specifically.