Hangsaman
Shirley Jackson
3.78 · 18 ratings · Published: 1951
The Sunday afternoon cocktail party, to which Arnold Waite has invited his literary friends and neighbors, serves to etch in the details of this family's life, and to draw Natalie into the vortex. The story concentrates on the next few critical months in Natalie's life, away at college, where each experience reproduces on a larger scale the crucial failure of her emotional life at home. With a mounting tension rising from character and situation as well as the particular magic of which Miss Jackson is master, the novel proceeds inexorably to the stinging melodrama of its conclusion. The bitter cruelty of the passage from adolescence to womanhood, of a sensitive and lonely girl caught in a world not of her own devising, is a theme well suited to Miss Jackson's brilliant talent.
- thriller 4
- horror 3
- classics 3
- gothic 3
- 20th century 3
- mystery 3
- literary fiction 3
- dark academia 3
- coming of age 3
- bildungsroman 3
- suspense 2
- spooky 2
- contemporary 2
- dark 2
- psychological 2
- realistic 2
- lgbtq+ 2
- college/university 2
- crime 1
- vampires 1
- ghosts 1
- funny 1
- satire 1
- monsters/creatures 1
- supernatural 1
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- content warnings
- mental illness 2
- format - reader age
- book 1
- adult fiction 1