We Have Always Lived In The Castle – Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived In The Castle was Shirley Jackson’s last novel, published in 1962 (three years before her death). She was experiencing extreme agoraphobia at the time, and struggled to leave her bedroom, so it’s unsurprising she crafted a novel about characters who were largely isolated from the world and only felt safe in their own home.

I’m hardly the first to say this, but it must be said all the same: We Have Always Lived In The Castle has a killer opening paragraph.

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 my family is dead.

We Have Always Lived In The Castle (Page 1)

It’s been called “the best opening paragraph of any novel”, with “coercive” language that makes it “impossible” for the reader not to go on reading. 10/10 co-sign these comments, it’s an incredible hook.

Mary Katherine – or Merricat, for short – narrates the novel, in a creepily childlike voice. Even though she’s ostensibly eighteen, there’s a certain immaturity to her tone that evokes every horror movie you’ve ever seen with a young girl who sees things or gets possessed by a demon (I’d imagine all such films owe a big debt to Jackson’s novel). She has a tendency to engage in fantastical thinking, presented as perfectly logical to the reader, and her own rudimentary witchcraft – presumably as an attempt to escape realities that are uncomfortable to her, and exercise some agency where she has very little real power. It’s all very unsettling, and a masterstroke by Jackson. The setting and conceit of the novel are ominous on their own, but Merricat’s narration turns it up to eleven.

As she says in her introduction, Merricat lives with her sister Constance, and at the time of the action of the novel, they shared the family home with their ailing uncle,. Everyone else in the Blackwood family died six years prior, after being poisoned with arsenic mixed into the family’s sugar bowl. Merricat was sent to bed without dinner on the night in question, so she escaped the family’s fate, and the uncle survived the poisoning (though it left him in ill health). Constance was at the dinner table with the family, but refused to add sugar to her meal – that made her suspicious in the eyes of the police and the local true crime enthusiasts.

She was charged and tried for murder, but not convicted. Still, most of the villagers in the local town believe her guilty, and her anxiety and shame over their judgement has made her a huge agoraphobe. She refuses to leave the house, and the uncle can’t, so Merricat makes a twice-weekly trek into the village for groceries and library books. Other than that, they live completely cut off from the rest of the world.

The three of them might have got along alright in their own weird way if not for the arrival of a stranger: a cousin, Charles, who seems hell-bent on seducing Constance into giving him the remaining family fortune. Merricat takes an instant dislike to Charles, and tries increasingly inventive ways of ‘encouraging’ him to leave them alone. In the end, she takes it a step too far, by tipping his still-smouldering pipe into a waste-paper basket. It ignites, and the whole house goes up in a blaze.

I’m skipping over big chunks of We Have Always Lived In The Castle in this potted summary, but I don’t want the review to be longer than the book. In the end, the uncle dies in the fire, and Constance and Merricat salvage what is left after the fire is extinguished and continue to live in the irrevocably damaged house. At one point, Constance quietly reveals who really killed the Blackwood family, and then it’s barely mentioned again.

So, you’ll likely spend most of We Have Always Lived In The Castle waiting for a confession or explanation that never comes. In fact, Jackson does very little to release any of the tension that she builds so effectively throughout the story. There’s no true denouement, just the most likely kind of ‘happy’ ending – one that barely seems happy at all, except for the surviving characters repeatedly declaring how happy they are.

It’s a remarkably complex story for one so short, and you can read a lot into it. I saw We Have Always Lived In The Castle as a book about isolation – physical and psychological – and cruelty. It’s a story from the perspective of the wicked witch of all the tropes, why she lives in the haunted house and how she came to be there. It will send shivers up your spine, and it will no doubt frustrate you at times, but it’s still an arresting read and you’ll struggle to look away.

Read We Have Always Lived In The Castle on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of We Have Always Lived In The Castle:

• “It turns out that the only scary thing about this book is the cover. There was a complete lack of plot. This book is not a horror novel. It’s not a thriller. It is 146 pages of silly and pointless descriptions of what everyone’s going to eat and clean.” – Little Miss Fun
• “A spoiled brat becomes the head of the household. Page-after-page of a mundane routines and uninteresting dialogue. Cook, clean, argue, hide, repeat.” – eduardo
• “I just didn’t get it. This is like a weird angry little girls angry diary entires.” – Lubin Family
• “If you like stories where the main character is a narcissist and a criminal, perhaps this book is for you. It is well written.” – Marga Snyder
• “A book where neuroses are not so fun.” – Galliwampus