Word: pyromaniacal
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Literally, Jubb is a voyeur, a fetishist and pyromaniac. By all odds, his doings should add up to nothing more than one more nasty little British shocker-unoriginal as sin, boring as politics and derivative as all get-out. Instead, it is a remarkably good book. Through some weird alchemy of talent and restraint, Novelist Waterhouse has transformed an outrageously raw case history into a recognizably human portrait...
...Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson. An exquisitely subtle look at a household containing a lunatic, a poisoner and a pyromaniac, by an authoress who specializes in making light of the macabre...
...curiosity-backward in time to whatever dreadful event has brought the Black-woods to their present predicament, forward to some nameless but newly foreshadowed disaster in the future-the book manages the ironic miracle of convincing the reader that a house inhabited by a lunatic, a poisoner and a pyromaniac is a world more rich in sympathy, love and subtlety than the real world outside...