We Have Always Lived in the Castle
by Shirley Jackson
6 February 2025
I managed to miss something in the very first line of this book where Mary Katherine introduces herself as eighteen years old and for a large chunk of the book I was torn between thinking she was a lot younger and quite a bit older. Which only added to the sense of unreliable narration that the book gives you. She’s telling us about her isolated life in her family’s rather Gothic sounding home, with her older sister Constance and Uncle Julian who is elderly and disabled. You find out early on that the rest of the family died in an incident a few years earlier, and that Constance was acquitted of this crime. It’s not a whodunnit by any means, it slowly dawns on you whilst you are reading what probably happened and then other incidents in the book act as confirmation.
The book was written in 1962 and I’m not clear when it was supposed to be set but I got the impression of the 1940s or 1950s from the writing, and the writing is super evocative bringing back memories of all the New England horror stories I read in my youth (weirdly not including Stephen King, something I should remedy sometime). Though this isn’t a supernatural horror story at all. My partner read it before me and told me it was a black comedy, that aspect of it didn’t really stand out to me at first, but by the end, yes, definitely.
It’s a short book, and easy reading in one way but quite disturbing in others. Definitely worth a read.
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