I remember that I stood on the library steps holding my books and looking for a minute at the soft hinted green in the branches against the sky and wishing, as I always did, that I could walk home across the sky instead of through the village.
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We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a 1962 novel by Shirley Jackson. The author’s final work, it tells the story of eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood, who lives with her sister and ill uncle on a lavish estate. Six years prior, the Blackwood family was left scandalized after the majority of the family was poisoned with arsenic that was mixed into the sugar. Since then, Mary Katherine and the remnants of her family have earned the hatred and scorn of the village people, while they live their quiet lives away from the rest of the world.
I wasn’t too sure what to expect from this novel when I picked it up. The premise sounded interesting, and I had heard that it was chilling, and I haven’t really read much horror, and wanted a good, unnerving read, especially after my last few books (adventures like The Hobbit, and melancholic like The Golden Mean). But this novel is not a horror story, and I guess I should have done a little more research before jumping into it. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is more… unnerving mystery than anything else. Jackson’s first person narrative, from the perceptive of Mary Katherine Blackwood holds a strange, unnerving quality throughout the entire book. You get the perception that there’s something off about the eighteen-year-old, something sinister, and yet childishly innocent. It’s a voice unlike any I’ve read before, and it’s beautifully and skillfully crafted. Mary Katherine is a character that, I think, will remain with her readers for a while. She’s bizarre, twisted, trapped in a world of magical realism with strange spells and rituals to keep her safe, and I was never quite sure if she actually believed in them, or simply used them as a way to combat the almost senile thoughts and images that played out in her mind.
This was an odd book… It was simple, short, and truthfully not a lot happened in it, there wasn’t an extraordinary amount of shocking plot or twisted character development, but it was deeply disturbing, but almost on a subconscious level. It was definitely an interesting read, and a book that I will probably come back to later on for a second and third read. And it’s one I highly recommend!
