We Have Always Lived in the Castle - Shirley Jackson

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

By Shirley Jackson

  • Release Date: 2024-01-23
  • Genre: Classics
Score: 4
4
From 51 Ratings
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Description

Shirley Jackson’s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family’s dark secret
Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate.

Reviews

  • Spooky but anticlimactic

    4
    By sashasss96
    I was pulled in by the clear, direct prose in this book and hooked by the unique characterization of the narrator— a feral, unpredictable and sometimes violent little girl named Merricat. The central mystery is the mass poisoning of the Blackwood family, for which Merricat’s oldest sister was tried and found innocent. This book is deliciously gothic, and scratched the itch of reading about a spooky old family in a spooky old house. Merricat’s narration reminded me at times of Scout in “To Kill A Mockingbird” — this story has none of the sociopolitical gravity/complexity, but the two are similar in terms of having a distorted and aggrandizing view of the world. I knocked off a star because I found the ending to be anticlimactic; the text seemed more intent on making an artistic statement than achieving a cathartic resolution. However I give the author big points for the story’s brevity; the prose is crystal-clear and stripped down to the bone.

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