This book will make you question your own morals for taking sides with the narrator.
Author Shirley Jackson never disappoints, and with her gripping book ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’ she relates the mystery of the Blackwood family through Mary Katherine, an eighteen year-old trapped in her own sinister worldliness view on life. The rich snobbish family, despised by nearby villagers, is poisoned by arsenic in their food. Only three survive: Mary Katherine, her agoraphobic sister Constance who finds her own peace by cooking in the kitchen, and their crippled Uncle Julian who’s left obsessing about the murder everyday six years later. They live a strict life cursed with a routine that remains shut off from the outside world, until their life is toppled with an unexpected arrival.
Merricat Blackwood’s words creep on you as you decide to pause reading to drink a cup of tea. The characterization is bizarre; unethical yet polite, evil yet hauntingly persuasive. She’s convincing in her views which are devoid of sugar-coating, and this allows the story to increase in its level of creepiness with every page. Her views towards the villagers is understandable, as they bully her every time she visits to buy groceries.
Like all of Shirley Jackson’s books, this story is written with a style that consumes your thinking. It shows the greatness of writing and the simplicity of story-telling. It’s a horror story without monsters. The only monsters that are there are formed in the reader’s mind – as you question your own moral standing, as though the uninvited guest is the story itself. The horror happens when the creepiness grows on you.
“I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs.Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.”
BOOK RECOMMENDATION:
The Flying Circus by Susan Crandall
A breathtaking saga of a fugitive accused of murder, a long-retired emotional pilot, and a girl who escapes her family. The trio has an exciting adventure while running off from state to state and getting into trouble! Will they make it through when they face gangsters and wild races?
