#Spooktober-‘We Have Always Lived In The Castle’ by Shirley Jackson

About the book..

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-cap mushroom.

Everyone else in my family is dead..

‘We Have Always Lived In The Castle’ by Shirley Jackson is available from Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions, I got mine second hand but you can pick them up pretty much all over with a wide variety of covers.

A deeply disturbing and engrossing read, the horror is found in the bits in between, the liminal space that bends characterisation and plot , resides in the reader’s psyche in a manner unlike that of any other writer.

Merricat (Mary Katherine) narrates her shrewdly observed daily routine in this small town of seemingly no importance. Her family are both half dead and half alive,she is the one who goes out to town and engages with the people who live there.

And yet, it is clear when she mentions the library books being 5 months overdue that something or someone has gotten between her and the thing that she enjoyed doing so much.

Either that or she found the information she was searching for and felt no need to return them….

The castle family are as needed by the town to turn into pariahs, as towns always do whilst they exist to remind the family why they are and remain outsiders

It is why they always live in the castle and stick to a set routine for in that rigidity is class, culture and safety.

Until a long lost cousin appears and wants the castle for himself and suddenly things take a very strange and dramatic turn.

The Blackwoods are a distinct and uneasy family to bother with,as exemplified by their taking tea with a family friend who continues to bother with them after the poisoning.

They fill their house with belongings,preserve and pickle what they grow in the garden (also,neatly, the manner of death )and Bury parts of themselves and thier history in the actual ground

It is as though they are haunting themselves whilst alive while being equally haunted by the acts which took half of them to the grave

The acquittal of the poisoner was because of the lack of clear reasoning why it was done.

But does there always have to be a reason?

The taut and clever plotting is matched by the succinct and detailed descriptors which bring the family and their environs so vividly to life.

And when you finish, you find that much like the Blackwoods, you have buried a part of this quite chilling and extraordinary book within your skin.

About the author…

Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson.

She is best known for her dystopian short story, “The Lottery” (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that “no New Yorker story had ever received.” Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, “bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse.”

Jackson’s husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that “she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.” Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson’s works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of “personal, even neurotic, fantasies”, but that Jackson intended, as “a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb”, to mirror humanity’s Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman’s statement that she “was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery‘, and she felt that they at least understood the story”.

In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.

Links-https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/51vl5GhK5HywWXLHkNBpgBC/dark-arts-the-haunting-of-hill-house-author-shirley-jackson