Shirley Jackson: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

            This book was a revelation! It’s definitely one of my favorites, though so scary that I ate far too many Doritos reading it. Woe! Snack foods: a useful gauge of threat levels in fiction.

            The novel starts off with an unreliable narrator who seems to be slipping in and out of reality. Merrikat walks into town to buy groceries, but keeps up a running theme of magical thinking and constant threat, like a terrified small child. She seems to believe that she can stave off these threats by careful adherence to seemingly arbitrary rules. Her fears seem ludicrous until she is seated in the diner with her cup of black coffee and some men come in and begin to taunt and threaten her. It’s not just awful. It’s terrifying.

            Merrikat’s return to the family property and finally the family home feels like an escape from the insane village, where a girl can’t even walk down the street without being taunted by personalized nursery rhymes. It quickly becomes clear that the household is a strange trio, however. Merrikat’s older sister, Constance, is the one that the village supposes killed their entire extended family—with the exception of Uncle Julian, who survived, but in a wheelchair--by putting arsenic in the sugar bowl. Constance hides from the village because they all believe she poisoned the family and somehow escaped conviction. It’s clear immediately that Merrikat was the poisoner, angry over being sent to bed without any supper, and Constance simply protected her. Uncle Julian is writing an account of that day over and over, cared for by the two girls.

            Their bizarrely peaceful coexistence together is the kind of Chekhovian claustrophobic happy family nightmare that shines an unfortunate light on all of the other supposedly normal families. Every family has its secrets and its compromises. They just don’t usually involve mass murder and arsenic in the sugar bowl.

            Throughout, Merrikat’s magical realist experience of the world shows her to be dissociative at best and criminally insane at worst. She is well aware that she killed her family. But she also believes that if she buries certain items around the property and nails certain other items to trees and carries out protective rituals, she can keep the last remnants of her family safe. When her father’s old notebook falls from its tree, victim of a rusted nail, a horrible cousin appears on the scene and tries to bully and threaten all of them into submission in a blatant attempt to steal their money and capitalize on their notoreity. Cousin Charles is hateful at first because he’s so normal, then because he’s invasive and unwelcome, then because he seems to be winning Constance over, to the point where she even considers putting Uncle Julian in a home.

            Merrikat makes move after move against Charles, destroying possessions, ruining his bed, and finally knocking his still-lit pipe into a wastebasket full of newspapers, setting their house on fire. This was the most distressing part of the book to read, because Constance and Merrikat were completely incapable of coping with this basic household emergency. They left Uncle Julian on his own, for example, so terrified of coming face to face with all of the hostile strangers who came to fight the fire that they decided he would be fine and escaped together with the cat.

            Once again, what seems like irrational terror becomes perfectly legitimate precautions, because once the ambulance takes away Uncle Julian, dead from a heart attack, and the fire trucks put out the fire and leave, the villagers absolutely destroy the rest of the house, smashing everything they can get their hands on in a barbaric orgy of hatred and rage. Constance and Merrikat’s terror of the villagers seemed so extreme before that, but they were proven absolutely right.

            I’m an avid fan of the gothic house, but I don’t think I’ve seen one subjected to so much direct and literal animosity before. Generally it’s a little more figurative! Even better is the way Merrikat and Constance (and the cat) rebuild their lives in the remains of the burned mansion: they clean up the mess, rescuing any unbroken crockery and putting spices back on the shelves. They are delighted to find the flour and potatoes haven’t been touched, nor the milk and eggs. It’s like they live in a medieval fantasy world where looting and pillaging are just part of life. Their bizarrely disconnected existence takes on an even stranger turn when guilty villagers start leaving offerings of food on their front doorstep in the evenings, helping to feed the girls whose home they destroyed.

            The girls seem perfectly capable of living out their lives in this makeshift happy home, wearing tablecloths on laundry day, growing vegetables, barricading the usable rooms from the burned and broken rest of the house. When Charles comes back for one last attempt to get to Constance—and their fortune, most of all—he just seems weak and pathetic, pushed around by the photographer who drove him there, far diminished from the malevolent force he was previously. Charles and the villagers all end up doing exactly what Merrikat wants, leaving her alone with her beloved sister, just the two of them, keeping house in the burned out shell of their former home. 

            The structure of the novel is built entirely on the house. While it was in its full glory, it was an object of envy and even anger from the villagers. After the deaths of most of the family, the house contained secrets that nosy guests wanted to explore. This is the very dining room where the murders happened! This is the sugar bowl that was mysteriously washed out! The house drew fortune hunter Charles, whose invasion was obnoxiously physical: the smell of his pipe, his use of their father’s room, his appropriation of their father’s possessions. Merrikat in cleaning wiped that room’s doorknob, pleased to be able to erase one of Charles’ touches from the house. Charles was immediately hostile to Merrikat and chased her out of the house, taking over her territory. Burning him out of the house meant losing all of the upstairs as well, but it kept Merrikat and Constance together, the core of the family, all that remained. The shelves and shelves of ancestral canning in the basement was just one more wonderful way that the family and the house merged, such that Merrikat and Constance retrenched after the fire and depended on those generations of women who had put up preserves and pickles and every kind of food to sustain them.

            I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a book so completely centered in one house, with the possible exception of Stephen King’s Misery. That house was the enemy, though. This house is the embodiment of family as seen through the eyes of a distinctly insane and murderous juvenile arsonist. Constance doesn’t escape the verdict of insanity either, though, no matter how much she comes across as Cousin Marilyn Munster to Merrikat’s Wednesday Addams. Both sisters were complicit in hiding the crime of poisoning, after all. Constance’s flirtation with normality in the form of cousin Charles feels like betrayal, not rescue. Maybe the house had to be half destroyed to get the rest of the world to leave what remained of their family alone.