We Have Always Lived in the Castle Review

As much as I love reviewing recent releases, it’s just as important to go back and spend some time on the classics. This month, I finally picked up a book that I’d been meaning to read for years: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Jackson is one of the most prominent authors of twentieth-century Gothic. Her novel The Haunting of Hill House is a staple of the haunted house and psychological horror genres, while her short story “The Lottery,” is one of the most terrifying things I remember reading for school. However, it is her final novel—We Have Always Lived in the Castle, published in 1962—that really explores the Gothic in depth.

The story is told from the perspective of a teenager named Merricat Blackwood, the youngest of the three surviving members of the Blackwood family. Six years earlier, the entire family had been poisoned at dinner by arsenic-laced sugar. Uncle Julian survived being poisoned but his health never recovered, and he spends his days as an invalid, grasping at his memories of that final day, which he hopes to turn into a book. Constance, Merricat’s older sister, was suspected as the culprit since she didn’t take any sugar that night, but she was ultimately acquitted of the murders. Now agoraphobic and unwilling to be seen by outsiders, Constance never strays farther than the garden. Merricat is the only one willing and able to leave the property, and she endures the taunts and whispers of the villagers whenever she must go into town for groceries. Nonetheless, the three surviving Blackwoods have rebuilt a reasonably happy life in their isolated family home. Then, an estranged cousin named Charles arrives at their doorstep and threatens to change everything.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes a common literary trope—the idea of that old run-down house that everyone in the village says is cursed or haunted—and explores it from a new angle by taking on the perspective of one of the house’s inhabitants. To Merricat Blackwood, the house isn’t spooky or scary, it’s her home. Merricat, Constance, and Julian eat dinner every night in the room where the rest of their family died, and Constance continues to prepare the food, despite the fact that nearly everyone outside the house believes her to be a poisoner. These details aren’t macabre, they’re merely facts of life for the Blackwoods. The true horror of the story comes from the slow revelation that Merricat is an unreliable narrator, and that she’s been leaving out a few rather important details about what happened on that fateful night….

Though the story is set in the Northeast, We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes on a theme that is often central in the Southern Gothic subgenre: the decay of the upper class. The Blackwoods are a wealthy, upperclass family, with a fine house and extensive property. They look down on the villagers as being socially beneath them, and the only people allowed to call at the house are other members of high society who drive in from out of town. But all this wealth, money, and status is ultimately meaningless to the remaining Blackwoods. Far from being respected and revered by the villagers, they are mocked and hated. Merricat and Constance increasingly isolate themselves until they break off contact even with their high-society friends. Their vault full of money becomes useless once Merricat stops going into town to spend it. Meanwhile, the dilapidation and partial destruction of the house serves as an outward manifestation of the fate awaiting the Blackwood family, and perhaps the American aristocracy more broadly. Over the course of the story’s events, the Blackwoods go from being powerful and influential members of society to merely objects of fear, amusement, and sometimes pity to the villagers they once looked down on.

Have you read We Have Always Lived in the Castle? Let me know your thoughts in the comments! If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favor and grab a copy! You can find this classic work at your local retailer, or buy it online and support The Gothic Library in the process by clicking on this Bookshop.org affiliate link.