We Have Always Lived in the Castle

It was just meh. It didn’t have a plot and i didnt have fun while reading it so thats why i didnt like it.

It's unsettling in an innocuous way, like ringing in your ears. Jackson is amazing at completely pulling readers in to the atmosphere she creates. It's been so sunny and warm in Portland recently but I still felt chilled when I read.

The synopsis of the book basically says all I could say about it, other than Merricat is one of my favorite narrators ever. I love the way she thinks, the way she works within a system no one else is aware of. She reminds me of the little boy in the Twilight Zone who terrorizes the adults in his life by making his most macabre wishes come true. Except I always hated him, and I don't hate Merricat. She just wants what's best for her family, after all.

Having read the afterword now and knowing more about the author and her psyche, I have a better appreciation for the book.

I think you need to read this as an art piece. The story itself is pretty boring and slow. Nothing really gets resolved, which is fine by me, but nothing much happens either.

But if you read it knowing what the author felt living in her Vermont town and how she felt ostracized by the township, the story makes more of an impact.

It’d be a hard book to recommend and I’m not even sure how I feel about it now.

****5.0****

Review Soon

Great fall read; lots of mystery and questions that were very fun to experience.

Fun and creepy little book!

Lo mejor del libro es la atmosfera.

Algo es raro, algo esta mal desde el principio, el misterio se va revelando y es exquisito.

I was led to

We Have Always Lived in the Castle through the film of the same name (which is also spectacular). I love this book.

Even though I was disappointed that Merricat didn't end up killing Charles. That butthole deserved to die.

There are just so many feminist angles to this book⁠—from female autonomy to the negative effects of misogyny on males with disabilities⁠. Not to mention that this book goes along PERFECTLY with IC3PEAK's music.

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 deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

I have a lot of feelings about this novel. On the one hand, Jackson absolutely shows that she’s a master of her craft in building tension while diving into the psychology of totally unique characters within a wonderfully gothic setting; on the other, all of the characters and many of the events (if—and it’s a big “if”—Merricat’s account of the story is completely reliable) are so far outside the bounds of believability that it’s sometimes difficult to care/empathize. It’s a fever dream of a book, masterfully done and incredibly readable after the first few chapters, but so ungrounded that at times it just feels crazy.

From the opening paragraph, it’s clear that Merricat is insane. In many ways she’s painfully childlike, a character trait which runs the gamut from charming, whimsical imaginings, to slightly stranger and darker superstitions, to the unstable volatility of a toddler who might throw a temper tantrum at the slightest offense. If she were eight this might be more believably sinister, but at eighteen she just seems too crazy to feel completely real. Constance, meanwhile, exists in an almost dreamlike state, as if the shock of her family’s death/the trial never really wore off. Both of them (but especially Merricat as it’s her mind that we’re in) are all but completely detached from reality and unable to grasp the basic concept that actions have consequences and that those consequences must be lived with.

Where the novel really shines is in the atmosphere and prose. The tension never gives up; the entire novel is the shrieking

screeeeeeeeee that the string section makes in the soundtrack of a horror film. It feels like something terrible and completely unexpected might happen any moment. (Indeed, plot-wise, what kept me reading was wondering

what will happen next?, not

what happened earlier?—partly because “what happened earlier” is painfully obvious from the first couple of chapters and the big “reveal” toward the end is nothing more than an official confirmation of what the reader has long ago figured out. I think a big reason I initially DNF-ed this, and that I again found the first few chapters difficult to get into, is because it seemed to me as if the novel was going to center around a reveal of prior events, when, in fact, the plot is very forward-facing.) And the setting may feature the gothic house to end all gothic houses, especially by the end.

[2022 edit: I try not to go back and edit my reviews unless I reread, but since writing this I've realized what Jackson is

doing here, and it's been on my mind ever since:

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is Shirley Jackson subverting the trope of the rumored-to-be witches who live in the scary house on the outskirts of town. All the trappings are there: the dilapidated gothic mansion, the black cat, the reclusive and superstitious sisters, the village boys who dare one another to get as close as they can. Yet in Jackson's telling, witchcraft has no power; the sisters are mentally ill; the villagers leave offerings of food as a type of atonement. There's obviously more going on, but conceptually it's a kind of an anti-fairytale. And it's brilliant.]

I prefer

The Haunting of Hill House, but I still enjoyed and can appreciate

We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Some favorite quotes:

They can’t get in, I used to tell myself over and over, lying in my dark room with the trees patterned in shadow on the ceiling, they can’t ever get in any more; the path is closed forever.

I had to content myself with smashing the milk pitcher which waited on the table; it had been our mother’s and I left the pieces on the floor so Constance would see them.

And, Mary Katherine, you know as well as I do that nine-tenths of that feeling is nothing but your imagination, and if you’d go halfway to be friendly there’d never be a word said against you. Good heavens. I grant you there might have been a little feeling once, but on your side it’s just been exaggerated out of all proportion.”

Constance can put her hand upon a bewildering array of deadly substances without ever leaving home; she could feed you a sauce of poison hemlock, a member of the parsley family which produces immediate paralysis and death when eaten. She might have made a marmalade of the lovely thornapple or the baneberry, she might have tossed the salad with Holcus lanatus, called velvet grass, and rich in hydrocyanic acid. I have notes on all these, madam. Deadly nightshade is a relative of the tomato; would we, any of us, have had the prescience to decline if Constance served it to us, spiced and made into pickle? Or consider just the mushroom family, rich as that is in tradition and deception. We were all fond of mushrooms—my niece makes a mushroom omelette you must taste to believe, madam—and the common death cup—”

so long as they were where I had put them nothing could get in to harm us. I had always buried things, even when I was small; […] All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green, stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.

We were going to the long field which today looked like an ocean, although I had never seen an ocean; the grass was moving in the breeze and the cloud shadows passed back and forth and the trees in the distance moved.

“We’ll always be here together, won’t we, Constance?” “Don’t you ever want to leave here, Merricat?” “Where could we go?” I asked her. “What place would be better for us than this? Who wants us, outside? The world is full of terrible people.”

Today my winged horse is coming and I am carrying you off to the moon and on the moon we will eat rose petals.” “Some rose petals are poisonous.” “Not on the moon. Is it true that you can plant a leaf?” “Some leaves. Furred leaves. You can put them in water and they grow roots and then you plant them and they grow into a plant. The kind of a plant they were when they started, of course, not just any plant.” “I’m sorry about that.

I watched her while she swept up the glass; today would be a glittering day, full of tiny sparkling things.

I dusted the wedding-cake trim with a cloth on the end of a broom, staggering, and looking up and pretending that the ceiling was the floor and I was sweeping, hovering busily in space looking down at my broom, weightless and flying until the room swung dizzily and I was again on the floor looking up.

I wondered about going down to the creek, but I had no reason to suppose that the creek would even be there, since I never visited it on Tuesday mornings;

Time was running shorter, tightening around our house, crushing me.

No one had ever liked the summerhouse very much, I remembered. Our father had planned it and had intended to lead the creek near it and build a tiny waterfall, but something had gotten into the wood and stone and paint when the summerhouse was built and made it bad. […] The trees pressed too closely against the sides of the summerhouse, and breathed heavily on its roof, and the poor flowers planted here once had either died or grown into huge tasteless wild things.

I was wondering about my eyes; one of my eyes—the left—saw everything golden and yellow and orange, and the other eye saw shades of blue and grey and green; perhaps one eye was for daylight and the other was for night. If everyone in the world saw different colors from different eyes there might be a great many new colors still to be invented.

For one first minute we saw only the garden and the kitchen door, looking just as always, and then Constance gasped and said, “Oh, Merricat,” with a little moan, and I held myself very still, because the top of our house was gone. I remembered that I had stood looking at our house with love yesterday, and I thought how it had always been so tall, reaching up into the trees. Today the house ended above the kitchen doorway in a nightmare of black and twisted wood; I saw part of a window frame still holding broken glass and I thought: that was my window; I looked out that window from my room. There was no one there, and no sound.

I saw that ash had drifted among the vegetable plants; the lettuce would have to be washed before I could eat it, and the tomatoes.

I could feel a breath of air on my cheek; it came from the sky I could see, but it smelled of smoke and ruin. Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.

Sometimes they brought bacon, home-cured, or fruit, or their own preserves, which were never as good as the preserves Constance made. Mostly they brought roasted chicken; sometimes a cake or a pie, frequently cookies, sometimes a potato salad or coleslaw. Once they brought a pot of beef stew, which Constance took apart and put back together again according to her own rules for beef stew, and sometimes there were pots of baked beans or macaroni. “We are the biggest church supper they ever had,” Constance said once, looking at a loaf of homemade bread I had just brought inside. […] Once or twice there was a note in the basket: “This is for the dishes,” or “We apologize about the curtains,” or “Sorry for your harp.”

Sometimes I thought of the drawing room and the dining room, forever closed away, with our mother’s lovely broken things lying scattered, and the dust sifting gently down to cover them; we had new landmarks in the house, just as we had a new pattern for our days. The crooked, broken-off fragment which was all that was left of our lovely stairway was something we passed every day and came to know as intimately as we had once known the stairs themselves. The boards across the kitchen windows were ours, and part of our house, and we loved them. We were very happy, although Constance was always in terror lest one of our two cups should break, and one of us have to use a cup without a handle.

We learned, from listening, that all the strangers could see from outside, when they looked at all, was a great ruined structure overgrown with vines, barely recognizable as a house. It was the point halfway between the village and the highway, the middle spot on the path, and no one ever saw our eyes looking out through the vines.

Oh, Constance,” I said, “we are so happy.”

---

Original October 4, 2020 review:

DNF @ 42%

Maybe I will come back to this at some point. For now, it's just not grabbing me—I don't particularly like the characters or atmosphere or feel that interested in finding out what happened.