We Have Always Lived in the Castle

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is the most charming book about a murderer ever written, and the charm is the weapon.

Merricat Blackwood narrates, and she is eighteen, and she is delightful. She opens by telling you her name, that she likes her sister Constance and Amanita phalloides and the library, and that everyone else in her family is dead. She buries objects in the grounds as protective magic, nails a book to a tree, repeats three words she believes hold the house together, and walks into the village once a week for groceries while children sing a rhyme at her about arsenic. Jackson's achievement is that you are inside this voice for two hundred pages and it never once feels like unreliable narration as a technique. It feels like company.

Constance is the other half of it. Twenty-eight, acquitted at trial, universally believed guilty, she has not left the property in six years; she cooks, preserves, gardens, and manages Merricat and Uncle Julian with a serenity that is either saintly or something else. Julian, in a wheelchair, is writing and rewriting an account of the day of the poisoning, cannot keep its details straight, and refers to Merricat as a child who died.

It is a novel about being hated by your neighbours

The village is the horror. Jackson wrote this at the end of her life in a Vermont town where she and her family were genuinely disliked, and the book's agoraphobia is not metaphorical. The Blackwoods are rich, they were rich before, the family bought the land and kept it, and the village's resentment has had six years and a quadruple homicide to concentrate around. What happens in the final third — when the villagers come to the burning house, help a little, and then stay to break it apart, smashing crockery and shouting the rhyme — is one of the most frightening sequences in American fiction and there is nothing supernatural in it at all.

Cousin Charles is the plot

He arrives after the sisters' father's death, looking for the money, and he is a magnificently ordinary villain: hearty, acquisitive, condescending, and absolutely determined to be reasonable. Merricat's response to him is the novel's engine, and the book is very funny about how badly he reads the household he has walked into.

Where readers struggle

Almost nothing happens for the first hundred pages, and what does happen is a shopping trip and a tea. The prose is simple and the horror is entirely structural, so readers expecting Gothic machinery find it thin. And the ending's strange contentment is, for some people, the point at which the book loses them.

For Jackson's other and more famous novel, The Haunting of Hill House; for the same village closing ranks, The Wicker Man; for the same first-person narrator you should not trust, The Turn of the Screw.

The short answer: Merricat, trying to get rid of Charles, pushes his lit pipe into a wastepaper basket in his room. The house catches fire. The village fire brigade puts it out and then the villagers, who have gathered to watch, come inside and systematically wreck what is left — breaking the china, tearing the rooms apart, chanting the rhyme at the sisters. Uncle Julian dies that night. Charles leaves and later tries to come back for money and is refused. Constance and Merricat retreat into the two habitable rooms of the burned house, board up the windows, barricade the door and stop going out at all. And then the villagers, out of guilt, begin leaving food on the doorstep — baskets of cooking left anonymously at night, which the sisters take in. The novel's revelation arrives almost in passing in the final chapters: Merricat put the arsenic in the sugar bowl, Constance has known from the first day, and Constance's defence at trial and her six years of silence were both protection. The last line is Merricat telling her sister how happy they are, and meaning it.

Who poisoned the Blackwood family?

Merricat. She was twelve, she had been sent to bed without supper that evening, and she put arsenic in the sugar bowl knowing that Constance did not take sugar on her blackberries. Her father, mother, aunt and younger brother died; Uncle Julian survived with permanent damage. Constance washed the sugar bowl out before the police arrived — which the prosecution used against her at trial — and was acquitted, and has never contradicted the village's belief that she did it.

Why does Constance protect Merricat?

The novel never has her explain it, and that silence is the point. What it shows is that Constance knew immediately, cleaned the bowl, stood trial, was acquitted, came home and has spent six years feeding and managing her sister without reproach. The strongest reading the text supports is that Constance considers the family's treatment of Merricat part of the cause, and that the arrangement they have now — two sisters alone, a garden, a kitchen, no outside world — is one she also wants.

What is Merricat's magic?

A private system of protective rituals: burying objects at the boundaries of the property, nailing a book to a tree, placing her father's watch and a silver dollar in the ground, repeating three words of power that she will not say aloud twice, and treating the appearance of a new object or a broken ward as a catastrophe. It is not presented as effective and it is not presented as madness. It is what a child who poisoned her family built in order to keep the only remaining member of it inside the fence with her.

What happens when the villagers come to the house?

They come for the fire and stay for the house. The brigade extinguishes it; the crowd that has assembled then moves inside and breaks it up — smashing the kitchen, destroying the dining room where the poisoning happened, throwing things, singing the children's rhyme about Merricat and the arsenic. Charles tries to organise them and fails. It is a riot conducted by neighbours, in daylight, at a house where two women and a dying old man live, and Jackson writes it with complete calm.

Is the ending happy?

Merricat says so and the text does not contradict her. The sisters have what she has wanted the whole book: the house sealed, the outside world reduced to anonymous baskets of food, Charles gone, Julian gone, and nobody left to leave. By any outside measure it is a catastrophe — two women walled into a ruin, fed by the guilt of people who wrecked it. By Merricat's, it is the arrangement she poisoned four people to get. The novel's final effect is that you are pleased for her, and then you notice that you are.

Scored against the published rubric, here is what the numbers mean.

The threat at 088 is near the human ceiling — only 8 works score higher. There is nothing supernatural in the novel: the danger is a twelve-year-old with arsenic, a cousin with a motive, and a village with a grudge.

Pace 012 is extremely slow — only 9 works are slower. The first half is a household routine described in detail by someone who finds it beautiful.

Viscera 016 is very low — 10 works score lower. Four deaths by poison, six years earlier, described only in Julian's unreliable notes, plus a fire and some broken china.

Era bias 010 is deep analog — only 17 works score lower. A 1962 novel of village shops, a wheelchair, a wind-up watch and no technology at all.

Tone 044 is close to the midpoint — 93 works score lower, which is high for a book with four murders in it: the narrator is funny, the sisters survive, and the last page is contentment.

Reality anchor 040 is grounded — 26 works score lower. Merricat's magic produces no effects the text confirms, and everything else is a house, a garden and a road.

On shocks: one, and it is a sentence about a sugar bowl.