We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
138 pages
Published 1962
Read from April 20 to April 22
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
Never before, I think, has reading a grocery list seemed so creepy. A masterpiece of domestic menace and psychological horror, Castle's central strength is its narrative voice, which sustains the perfect balance of clarity and derangement. I don't believe the central ambiguity about who murdered the Blackwood parents was meant as a mystery; I certainly sussed it out in the early going, well before it gets spelled out. The book's most interesting character work, however, does not derive from any question of whether it was Constance or Mary Katherine who poisoned the sugar, but rather from the cramped, furtive ways the surviving Blackwoods adjust to the reality of the killer in their midst, their rituals of appeasement portrayed through the naive, matter-of-fact eyes of the narrator.
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