We Have Always Lived in the Castle
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.
What Makes This Book Essential
This is Shirley Jackson's final novel and her most personal. Merricat Blackwood and her sister Constance live isolated in their family estate after most of the family died of arsenic poisoning — for which Constance was tried and acquitted. The village hates them. Merricat hates the village. She buries talismans, talks to her cat, and maintains elaborate rituals to protect their world.
When cousin Charles arrives to claim the estate's money, their fragile universe begins to shatter. Jackson inverts the gothic formula: the monster is out there in the village, in the mob, in normalcy. Merricat's twisted logic becomes completely coherent — even sympathetic — as the novel progresses.
Jackson was seriously ill when she wrote Castle; the siege at the novel's climax, where the villagers destroy the house while the sisters hide, has the quality of lived nightmare. A devastating, darkly funny masterwork that Time named one of the 100 best English-language novels.
Read Free First — Public Domain Classics
Not ready to buy? Start with these free books in the same gothic fiction tradition — available instantly on Cyber Library, no account needed.
Enjoyed the review? Pick up We Have Always Lived in the Castle and start reading today.