“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 our family is dead.”
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle
Horror is not my genre. It never has been. I’m not one of those people who finds scary movies cathartic or enjoys the rush that comes from getting spooked. I honestly hate it. That said, every once in a while I’ll watch a movie or pick up a book that’s creepy without being outright scary. Like, I can watch A Quiet Place, but I’ll never watch Friday the 13th. I’m not going to read Carrie or The Shining, but I can handle a book like We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
If Jackson’s name rings a bell, it’s likely because you read The Lottery in high school literature class. It’s a classic. Or maybe you’ve seen The Haunting of Hill House, which was adapted by Netflix a few years ago. Her work has been around for a long time and influenced a lot of more contemporary horror writers.
Okay, let’s get down to business. I really liked We Have Always Lived in the Castle, but I was (foreseeably) very unsettled by it. In case you didn’t gather from the opening lines of the book, quoted above, Mary Katherine Blackwood is a psychopath. The whole story is told from her perspective and she’s a delightfully creepy unreliable narrator. Jackson makes it very plain that Mary Katherine (or Merricat, as she’s called by her sister) is disturbed while also imbuing her with charm and likeability. I found myself sympathizing with and rooting for Merricat, even though she said things like “I’m going to put death in all their food and watch them die,” and “I would have to find something else to bury here and I wished it could be Charles.” Yikes.
Basically, the premise of this story is that the Blackwoods, a wealthy and established family, were all poisoned with arsenic one night at dinner. Only three family members survived: Merricat, who had been sent to her room without dinner; Uncle Julian, who survived but whose health and mind were never the same after the poisoning; and Constance, who had prepared the dinner and who hadn’t eaten the arsenic-tainted sugar. Constance had been acquitted of the murder, but the townspeople still believed her to be guilty and ostracized the already unpopular Blackwoods from village life. Merricat is the only one who dares to go to the village anymore, and while she’s there she’s treated with derision. The local boys taunt her as she walks by:
“Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!”
While I read, I kept thinking about how sad that the townspeople treated Merricat this way. If they thought Constance was guilty, then they saw a young girl living with her murderous older sister and mocked her instead of trying to help her. How sick is that? They’d decided long before the murders that they’d hated the haughty Blackwood family, and so they were unable to look upon a tragedy with any sort of compassion or empathy. This occurs again and again throughout the book. Something objectively terrible will happen to the Blackwood girls and the villagers rejoice in their suffering.
It made me reflect on a similar tendency in today’s world. Most of us have a “team” with which we identify, whether political, racial, religious, or other. When we divide ourselves into teams or sides, we pit ourselves against the “other.” It’s us versus them. In the case of Shirley Jackson’s fictional village, it’s the villagers versus the Blackwoods. And when we pit ourselves against the “other,” it’s often easy to forget that the “other” is human. We get swept up in the bad feelings and we neglect to honor the dignity and humanity of people who are on a different team, whatever that may be. It’s the kind of thing that leads us to mercilessly mock a politician who makes a gaffe or write spiteful comments on an internet post of a celebrity discussing her recent miscarriage. We can only delight in the suffering of others when we separate ourselves from them. When we single them out as different or less than.
Shirley Jackson’s work is masterful in We Have Always Lived in the Castle because she shows us that people are the real monsters. In this story, there are very few innocent people. Almost everyone is willing to hurt other people. Almost everyone is out for themselves. It’s chilling, and though the events are fictitious, the people, the monsters, are real. They’re you. They’re me.
If you’re looking for something that’s creepy but won’t keep you up all night, We Have Always Lived in the Castle may be the book for you.
Happy Reading!
