We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

The psychological impact is never about the identity, it's about the implications of it. Three are left: Uncle Julian, left crippled by the poison, hanging on to the remnants of his mind, obsessed with the tragedy of the day of the murder Constance, an agoraphobiac trapped in the narrow confines of her domestic universe, cooking for the remnants of her family with a strained chirpy attitude - a young woman who was also the cook on the day of the fateful arsenic poisoning and therefore is considered the poisoner in the eyes of the villagers and Mary Katherine, Merricat, the narrator of the story, now eighteen, who was sent to her room without dinner on the day of the poisoning, who now serves as a link between her diminished and scorned family and the rest of the world.įor a careful reader, the identity of the poisoner is really very easy to figure out after the first few pages. You see, six years ago half of the members of the Blackwood family were poisoned by arsenic in their food. Everyone else in our family is dead.”īehind the events of the story is the mystery of the Blackwood family, rich New England landowners who are quite well-aware of their presumed class-snobbish superiority over the inhabitants of the nearby village the family which is in turn met with distrust, fear and even hatred - not quite unfounded, actually. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom.

I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. 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 am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance.

And the most terrifying things are those that are left unsaid, that creep up at you from behind the printed lines, just hinted at and left for your own brain to chillingly realize.

No, it's the odd terror that comes when things go BUMP in the mind. This is a chillingly terrifying story that has nothing to do with the things that go BUMP in the night. What else can I say about this book to give it justice? Bizarre, strange, haunting, sinister, disturbing, twisted, foreboding, suffocatingly claustrophobic, leaving you with the ever-growing sense of unease.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson