The Bird's Nest
Back Cover Text:"...Undeniably brilliant...superlative entertainment; much the best book Shirley Jackson has written." - NEW YORK HERALD TRIBUNE
author of THE SUNDIAL and HANGSAMAN
She could take herself apart like a jigsaw puzzle - but what she put together was always some else...
"Shirley Jackson's best novel . . . brilliant, swift, at times immensely funny and alternately frightening." - Chicago Tribune
Who were these frightened, screaming phantoms of Elizabeth Richmond's lonely childhood - the chameleon, swift-change artists who grew from the traumatic effects of her mother's death like figures in a charade?
ELIZABETH, the numb, the stupid, the inarticulate, ridden by horror and unnatural fear of sexual contact.
BETH, the serious and thoughtful girl - pretty and susceptible - whose helplessness was engaging and winsome.
BETSY, the wanton, the wild, the insolent child, wearing the coarse mask of the "dirty" little girl fulfilling her carnal desires.
BESS, arrogant, graceless and cheap.
With all the materials for a hideous monster at hand, Dr. Victor Wright (for Elizabeth, Dr. Wrong) painstakingly patches and tacks together all that is good in Elizabeth while chipping away at the evil of a splintered personality - a personal ego fragmented and shorn of its normal whole self.
A nightmarish fugue of surrealistic recall and torment by a major writer of artistic vision and insight!