The title might sound dramatic, but the book was honestly so good I know I’ll be on my deathbed in 70 years like, “so did y’all read The Sundial?” I recently finished it and I cannot recommend it enough to basically everyone. It’s incredibly funny, witty, harrowing, and angering in equal measures and I ate it right up.
Without spoiling it, I will say if you only enjoy reading books with main characters who are nice people or who become nice people through the story, you may not like this one, as it’s The Great Gatsby-esque in that basically everyone sucks in varying ways and degrees (though I think it’s way more interesting, and I say this as someone who loves Gatsby). However, it’s really, really entertaining from literally the first paragraph onwards, so I IMPLORE you to give it a shot.
I went into the novel completely blind and that really enhanced the reading experience for me because it’s one of those books where you can’t entirely explain what it’s about until you’ve reached the end, but you’re hooked the whole time and want to get there. I already knew Shirley Jackson was a phenomenal author, but her balance of dark humor, sarcasm, internal turmoil, psychological horror, and family drama in this book is immaculate.
spoilers here: when you get to the end of the novel and never find out if the apocalypse is really coming or if it’s simply a bad storm, and having just come away from everyone’s complete nonchalance about the death of Mrs. Halloran (which they assume was a murder!!!) on top of the entire rest of the story, you just get left with this hilariously bitter taste in your mouth at the possibility of these people!! getting to be the ones who inherit the earth! And the sense of karmic retribution in the opposite; at the idea of the storm passing only for them to find the world hasn’t ended and they’ve uprooted and destroyed so much of their lives in hopes of preparing and shunning the “common” people, leaving them worse off than they started. It’s exquisite.
by richsherrywine