This is the first paragraph of We Have Always Lived in the Castle. It establishes the narrator and tells us a good bit about her.
“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.”
I think this type of book is best experienced when you know little about it, and I enjoyed going into it that way. Although I might have read it sooner if I had read more reviews. Thus my description and comments will be brief.
As this short novel starts, Mary Katherine (also known as Merricat) lives with her older sister, Constance, and her Uncle Julian in a very large but run down house. The reader learns shortly that everyone else in the family died from poisoning when eating a meal. For several years after the poisoning, Merricat was the only one who left the house. She would walk to the nearby village twice a week to do the shopping and get books from the library. Constance never left the house, and Uncle Julian was confined to a wheel chair.
My goal in reading this book was to read a Gothic novel, since I don't go for that genre much, and to read more by Shirley Jackson. Up to now I have only read a few of her short stories.
Overall, I enjoyed the book. This story was not nearly as scary or tense as I expected it to be. There was a sense of foreboding and waiting for something horrible to happen.
I liked Merricat's narration, and the depiction of their lives before and after the rest of the family died. I liked the way the ending was handled. The beauty of the story was in the way Jackson very slowly reveals small bits of the plot.
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Publisher: Penguin Books, 2006 (orig. pub. 1962).
Length: 146 pages
Format: Trade Paperback
Setting: Vermont, US
Genre: Gothic, Classic
Source: I purchased this book in 2017.
20 comments:
I completely agree with you, Tracy, about going into this book with very little background information. It's best appreciated like that, I think. And yes, Jackson was so good at slowly revealing the characters and pieces of the plot. I think that adds suspense to the story. And what an interesting narrator!
1) Why are the baddies always named Constance?
2) Five of my nieces/nephews attended Merricat's Castle School for preschool. I have always wondered how the school got its name but on the few occasions I ran into the proprietors it was always too hectic to ask. But it seems so strange!
One of my favorites. Her books about her children are as far from this as you can get and very enjoyable.
I read We Have Always Lived in The Castle years ago and back then I didn't have enough reading experience with unreliable narrators and so this book caught me by surprise. Shirley Jackson is so talented.
I read (or rather listened) to this book a few years ago. Think I had read it when I was a teen, but can't remember exactly. The mystery group that I attend usually does some kind of 'Gothic' book for October and we had a 'Shirley Jackson' month that year. Anyway, it was indeed an interesting book or weird...
As you've probably gathered, THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is her primary horror novel, and brilliant. There is an unsettling tendency running through her novels, but I don't think any of the others cross over into the supernatural. Not that she needed supernatural aspects to upset irritable readers, as with the response to "The Lottery" from NEW YORKER readers. And, indeed, her raising children books are almost cheerily comic.
I imagine I'd enjoy putting together a 2-front-cover "double novel"/dos-a-dos edition of THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and Robert Bloch's PSYCHO (also not supernatural, but certainly as outre as any suspense novel one is likely to find), which two 1959 publications have interesting echoes of each other. Richard Matheson's HELL HOUSE draws on both of them, if the Jackson more so. And otherwise, it would be hard to argue that both short novels haven't had a major effect on various narrative arts since.
This is one that I've had my eye on for a while (along with The Haunting of Hill House). I remember The Lottery from school and read The Sundial a couple of years ago.
Margot, reading this book has convinced me I need to read more of Jackson's writing. I should not have put this one off for so long.
Apart from the short story, The Lottery, this is the only book of hers I've read. I liked it well enough but was ever so slightly underwhelmed. Loved the narrator though.
Constance, I did not see Constance in this book as a baddie; at the most she was troubled? I love the name Constance.
That is a very good question about Merricat's Castle School. It seems that it must be connected with the book, but why would anyone use name that for a preschool?
Patti, This is definitely a book I would reread, to see how much my reaction changes after the initial read. I did enjoy it except for the sense of dread now and then.
I want to read the memoirs about her children also.
Kathy, I think books with unreliable narrators are much more enjoyable when you don't know that in advance. But nowadays it is hard to start reading a book without knowing that. She was a talented writer.
Kay, I am glad I finally read this book. I am more likely to try more of her novels now. Definitely I will try The Haunting of Hill House.
Todd, I have ordered a copy of The Haunting of Hill House. I did not realize it was so short. I can read just about anything (maybe not torture) if it is short. I have never read Psycho either (or watched the film).
Shirley Jackson writes really well and the books are not long. I just never liked novels that make me feel tense. This one was not like that so much.
Cath, It is amazing that Jackson keeps the reader sympathetic with Merricat to the end.
I've read other books by Jackson, and a lot of her short stories, but I don't think I've ever read this one. If I have, I don't remember it. Maybe I should put it on my 2025 reading list. :D
This is a good book, Lark. If you are like me, you probably already have a lot of books planned for 2025. I will read at least one more book by Jackson, maybe in 2025.
PSYCHO is about the same length, and is if anything, more subtle and less explicit than the film(s)...one set of the parallels of the novels' "afterlives" is that both had impressive '60s film adaptations ('60 for PSYCHO, '63 for HILL HOUSE), very unimpressive remakes three decades or so later, and a number of other related adaptations and spinoffs over the following decade+.
Todd, you have convinced me. I found a Kindle at a good price. I can give it a try easily in that format. I very rarely give up on a book once I have started.
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