The queen of the castle
Who doesn’t love a scary story? The late American author Shirley Jackson knew how to tell a terrifyingly good one. She’s best known for “The Lottery” (1948), the infamous short story in which townsfolk draw slips of paper to decide who’ll be stoned to death in the village square. Jackson also wrote the chilling novel The Haunting of Hill House (1959), a sort of pre- Amityville Horror, which Hollywood has adapted for the big screen twice. But it’s her last published novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), that really scares the bejesus out of me.
While working on my own novel, a ghost story of sorts called Boo, I often reread Castle for spooky inspiration.
Even the book jacket is creepy. A black-and-white scratchboard drawing by Swiss illustrator Thomas Ott shows two blond sisters looking wide-eyed at the viewer. The younger of the two, Merricat Blackwood, stares defiantly, her eyes raccoon-ringed, a black cat in her arms. The older sister, Constance Blackwood, peeks out warily from behind Merricat, her hands laid protectively on her sister’s shoulders. Around the Blackwoods stand the angry, mocking villagers, a crowd right out of Frankenstein and ready to pounce.
Castle is narrated by Merricat, whose voice is a mix of whimsy and madness. “My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood,” she says at the start of her tale. “I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”
Six years earlier, her parents, younger brother, and aunt all died agonizing deaths after they ate blackberries sprinkled with sugar that was laced with arsenic. Who put the poison in the family-heirloom sugar bowl? The elder sister — the sweet reclusive Constance — was fingered since she hadn’t put sugar on her own berries. Although brought to trial, she was acquitted for lack of evidence. The villagers may still suspect Constance, but the reader quickly figures out the real culprit: Merricat.
The novel begins as Merricat runs errands for herself, her sister, and their uncle Julian, the only survivor of the arsenic poisoning. Now both feeble and feebleminded, Julian spends his days writing a biography of the Blackwood family. In his bumbling way, he attempts to shed light on the tragedy that decimated the richest family in the village (Jackson based the town on North Bennington, Vermont, where she lived with her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, a professor and literary critic).
During her trip into town, Merricat, who’s eyeballed and mocked by the townsfolk, thinks, “I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery store some morning and see them all ... lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries ... stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donnell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.”
Though 18 years old, Merricat behaves like a child, as if she were stunted at age 12 on the fateful day when she was sent to bed without her supper and sought revenge by adding arsenic to the sugar bowl. Not once does she show remorse for her crime; indeed, it seems she’ll strike again if given a chance.
Later in the novel, she is given that chance: her cousin Charles comes to stay at the stately manor where the Blackwoods live. A few years older than Constance, he seems to be homing in on the woman’s
I wanted the mirth and misery so brilliantly on display in Shirley Jackson’s creepy final novel
heart (and her inheritance). Before he can alter the sisters’ static world, a possibility that terrifies Merricat, she sets fire to his bedroom.
Damaged by the fire and then ransacked by the villagers, the manor house becomes a shadow of its former self. Yet despite its decrepitude, it remains a protective castle for Constance and Merricat. Like the quasi-hermits Big Edie and Little Edie in Grey Gardens, the two women remain ensconced in their home, graduating to ever higher degrees of eccentricity.
As an homage, I named a street in Boo Merricat Blackwood Road (and included a stoning as in “The Lottery”). Like Merricat, my narrator is an odd duck, an eighth-grade science nerd who wakes up in a heaven reserved strictly for 13-year-old Americans. My goal with Boo was to blend the lightness of a children’s book with the darkness of a psychological thriller for adults. I wanted the mix of mirth and misery so brilliantly on display in We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Dorothy Parker said it best, calling Jackson “a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders.”