Hoo, buddy.
Despite being only about a hundred some pages and being in relatively simplistic prose, this book took me nearly a year (on and off) to get through. I’d pick it up, read through a few pages, then put it back down in favor of a less taxing read.
I really couldn’t tell you why this book was so strangely exhausting for me to read. It wasn’t like the work was bad. Shirley Jackson is a master, and she makes it easy to breach Merricat’s thought process. That is probably what is so frightening.
Though I know that ‘death of the author’ is what the literary world campaigns for when we are discussing literature, I have a morbid curiosity about particular writers (and don’t we all- think about the Elena Ferrante reveal a few days ago!). Most of them were perhaps even more captivating than their classic works.
Shirley Jackson was one.
Castle was her last novel, and it was written when she was in the clutches of agoraphobia, refusing to even leave her bedroom at the end. Even the title is something of a nod to this, and Merricat’s voice has echoes of a trapped animal. At eighteen, she sounds over a decade younger than she actually is, but has the manipulative skills of a politician, exacting power trips over her older sister Constance without even thinking.
This is an excellently creepy book to read in October, as are all of Shirley Jackson’s novels and short stories. What is striking is not the darkness in them, but the thought. The inventiveness and the panic that threads a lot of her work. Castle is practically vibrating with it.
Witchcraft is common in horror tropes involving women. In fact, it seems like one of pop culture’s biggest fears is that we are all brewing something up under our beds. So while Merricat’s usage of magic is unsurprising, the fact that it is sympathetic magic, which reads like something akin to a compulsion, is another light into a psyche of this feral woman child.
Merricat’s relationships with people are enlightening. Her sister Constance is lionized, and also treated as a child, despite the fact that she runs the house herself. Almost everyone else is usually relegated to cardboard characterization or merely It is striking that Merricat is the only person in the house that is able to leave the house, and is considered able enough to go out into the world, when her psyche is clearly fractured.
We Have Always Lived In The Castle is one of those books that changes every time that you think about it. It becomes more interesting, shows another hidden depth that you failed to see upon the first round.
Even though this book is about a murder and, for all the huge changes that goes on in the book, the characters themselves are relatively unchanged, which is a bold choice that pays off. It reads like a very disturbing fairytale, the simplicity one of the most unnerving parts of all.
Pick this up if you have a chance!
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