The House of the Seven Gables

On the scaffold, rope already at his throat, a condemned man named Maule looks at the judge who sent him there for witchcraft and promises that God will give him blood to drink. The judge, Colonel Pyncheon, builds his mansion on the dead man's garden anyway: seven steep gables, and a well that runs bitter from that day forward. A century and a half later, the curse is still collecting. Hepzibah, elderly and half-blind and mistaken for fierce when she is only frightened, opens a penny shop in the old front room to keep herself and her ruined brother fed. Clifford comes home from thirty stolen years in prison with a mind gone soft as bruised fruit, unable to bear an ugly line or a raised voice. A young lodger upstairs, taking daguerreotypes and carrying an older name than he admits to, is patient. Hawthorne wrote a house that will not release its dead, and lets the debt come due exactly where the reader has been dreading it.