I was reminded of these books-the hair rising on the back of my neck-while reading the new, comprehensive volume of Stevie Smith’s poems, edited and introduced by Will May. For years, I forgot I had read these books, as one might suppress a traumatic event, but later, when I happened on them again, one after the other, I realized that here, like sugar laced with rat poison, was the source of the feeling of unease, a ripple below the skin, that rarely deserts me. The other day, an acquaintance used the expression “It scared the bejesus out of me,” and even now I thought of that narrator, Merricat. The second was Shirley Jackson’s murder-spiked family tale, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle.” It was my first exposure to an unreliable narrator, and it scared me to death. It’s not an attractive doll, and its menacing presence turns nice girls into wicked ones. Arthur, was about a little English girl, Melissa, who finds a very old, knobby wooden doll, called Dido, in an attic. The first, “A Candle in Her Room,” by Ruth M. One book was for children the other was not. The books smelled of damp, and there was sand in the bindings. I read them both early, at nine or ten, in the summer in a tiny public library on Cape Cod, above the town hall, where my mother deposited me, often with my little sister, while she did errands. Two books have haunted me since childhood. The poet Stevie Smith, in a photograph originally published in 1954.
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