This is by Shirley Jackson (1916-65). It was published in 1962, and it's her last novel.

Source? The inimitable Douglas Library.

Reasons? Well, I loved The Haunting of Hill House. Such a beautifully creepy novel... And this one came with a double recommendation from Five Books (in the Thrillers and Gothic categories).

It turned out to be a wonderful read. But beware spoilers in what follows...

Castle is not as overtly scary as Haunting, and it's not really a story about the supernatural. But you're uncomfortable from the get-go, and that sense of anxious foreboding only increases.

This is the first paragraph: "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. 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 deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead."

OK... She's going to be a bit different... And actually, that last sentence proves to be not quite true (we will soon realize that our narrator often plays fast and loose with the "truth"). As well as her sister, there is also an Uncle Julian.



Mary Katherine (her sister calls her Merricat, but let's abbreviate her to MK) is on her way to the village when we meet her, with the aim of fetching groceries and library books. She's the only one who can carry out these tasks. Uncle Julian is incapacitated, and can't; Constance is agoraphobic, and won't. But it's not a job MK enjoys, because the villagers are distinctly hostile. MK hears their snide comments and taunts and giggles, feels "their flat grey faces with the hating eyes". She wishes they were dead... She tells us: "Constance said, 'Never let them see that you care,' and 'If you pay any attention they’ll only get worse,' and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. 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 and dying."

MK is -- well, unusual... When she hates, she hates with a passion. When she wants to escape reality, she imagines she's on the moon: "Things on the moon were very bright, and odd colors; my little house would be blue." She's kind of feral (withdrawing to nature when under stress, and breaking things in order to make a point), and her rituals and fear of change suggest OCD. She's also witch-like in her belief in omens, her use of talismans and magic words, her knowledge of poisons -- and her relationship with her hugely admirable cat, Jonas. Clearly, an oddball. And yet we don't dislike her. There's a huge fear in her that we recognize and empathize with.

Drip by drip, we learn that something big happened six years ago. A poisoning, no less. MK's parents and brother, and Julian's wife, were all wiped out. Julian survived, albeit in poor health. The poison was in the sugar, and Constance never took sugar; MK had been sent upstairs with no supper that night, so she survived too. Constance (who not only survived, but wiped out the sugar bowl before the police arrived, and then declared herself guilty) was tried for murder, but acquitted for lack of evidence. The village people, however, still clearly believe she's the one who dunnit ... The Blackwoods had always been a reserved and conservative family, with a strong desire to keep themselves to themselves. Since the notorious case, however, their contact with the outside world has been limited to MK's little trips to the village, and formal, stilted visits by various local ladies.

Drip by drip, we're also warned that something is going to happen. The library books, for example, are going to be "the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf". There's a drumbeat of expectation: "That day, which was the last time Helen Clarke ever came for tea..." Jackson skilfully builds dread, constantly unsettling us with the feeling that something is very amiss.

The present, meanwhile, between the horror of what we know, and the fear of what is to come, is odd, but peaceful and amiable. The sisters are clearly fond of each other. For MK, Constance is "the most precious person in my world, always", and she's "chilled" (a word that's used frequently) when her big sister throws out suggestions that she might start going out again soon. Constance, meanwhile, is extraordinarily tolerant of her weird sibling ("silly Merricat"), and seems to enjoy her role of cook and housekeeper. She's kind and patient towards the slightly addled Uncle Julian.

He's the one who is most helpful in throwing light on the events of six years ago. It was obviously an unhappy household, where suppressed currents of animosity seethed under the surface, and occasionally broke out so that "they quarrelled hatefully". At one point MK imagines a conversation where her family (still alive) talk about NOT PUNISHING her, and giving her everything she wants. Was it the reverse that happened in reality?

Uncle Julian, despite Mary Katherine's presence, clings to the belief that she "died in an orphanage, of neglect, during her sister's trial for murder". (Lynette Carpenter observes that this persistent "denial of Merricat's existence serves as a reminder of her former status in the Blackwood family and of her especial invisibility to the Blackwood men".)


Brilliant artwork on this Penguin edition

***

And then the change that MK so fears actually comes. The form it takes is the unexpected arrival of Charles, the son of Uncle Arthur (their dead father's brother). He's a most unlikeable young man, clearly there to secure some of the wealth he has been told about. He's ingratiating towards Constance, but thoroughly nasty to Uncle Julian and Mary Katherine. Not that the latter doesn't give back his hostility in full measure... Constance is curiously drawn to him.

More and more, he encroaches, taking on MK's village shopping duties, offering to fix the broken step (which he doesn't), and becoming more and more demanding of Constance's time. But she thinks well of him, and clearly seems to be seeing him as a ticket out of this strange life, and into some kind of normality. Under his influence, she starts feeling as though she has brought MK up badly, and should have put Uncle Julian into a hospital.

MK, appalled by the way Charles is pushing himself into their lives, and spooked by his resemblance to her father, determines to see him off. She breaks the watch he has appropriated (it used to belong to her father). She invades his bedroom, pouring water into the bed, and tearing down the curtains. After which, there's hell to pay. Poor Constance... Blames herself, tries to protect MK from Charles, tries to elicit an explanation from her sister. An unenviable position.

Finally, MK uses the pipe Charles has left smouldering to start a fire... Desperate measures...

The result is cataclysmic. There's an invasion by the great stomping feet of the fire brigade: "I took Constance along the porch to the corner where the vines grew thick, and she moved into the corner and pressed against the vines. I held her hand tight, and together we watched the great feet of the men stepping across our doorsill, dragging their hoses, bringing filth and confusion and danger into our house. More lights moved into the driveway and up to the steps, and the front of the house was white and pale and uncomfortable at being so clearly visible; it had never been lighted before."

Having put out the fire, the brigade chief then leads the villagers in an onslaught of vandalism. That's a shocking moment, but there's worse: Constance and her sister are surrounded by taunting, obnoxious people; no matter which direction they try to escape in, they're blocked. "Over it all was the laughter..." Jackson gives us here an absolutely terrifying scene of persecution.

Eventually, another local manages to restore order, and announces that Uncle Julian has died of a heart attack in the melee. The rampaging villagers disperse.


A castle we passed the other week... No similarities are suggested

Mary Katherine leads Constance away to her little bower: "I would cover her with leaves, like children in a story, and keep her safe and warm. Perhaps I would sing to her or tell her stories; I would bring her bright fruits and berries and water in a leaf cup. Someday we would go to the moon." She barricades them both in with branches.

And this is the point where what we've come to suspect is confirmed:

"One of our mother’s Dresden figurines is broken, I thought, and I said aloud to Constance, 'I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die.'
"Constance stirred, and the leaves rustled. 'The way you did before?' she asked.
"It had never been spoken of between us, not once in six years.
"'Yes,' I said after a minute, 'the way I did before.'"

The next morning, the sisters take stock of what's left of their home. "We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame... The house seemed to shiver when she opened the door, although one more draft could hardly chill it now... I stood at the foot of the stairs, looking up, wondering where our house had gone, the walls and the floors and the beds and the boxes of things in the attic; our father’s watch was burned away, and our mother’s tortoise-shell dressing set. I could feel a breath of air on my cheek; it came from the sky I could see, but it smelled of smoke and ruin. Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky."

As the sisters organize a space that just the two of them can occupy -- shutting the doors on all the ruined rest -- MK thinks they're going to be very happy. She covers the kitchen windows with cardboard so that people can't look in. She's working on how she can build barricades...

Various people from the village entreat them to emerge. "No one's going to bother you..." Eventually these people give up, and go away.

Constance apologizes for reminding her sister of "why they all died":

"'I wanted you to forget about it. I never wanted to speak about it, ever, and I’m sorry I did.'
"'I put it in the sugar.'
"'I know. I knew then.'
"'You never used sugar.'
""No.'
"'So I put it in the sugar.'

Constance says they'll never talk about it again.

"I was chilled, but she smiled at me kindly and it was all right.
"'I love you, Constance,' I said.
"'And I love you, my Merricat.'"

You can't help but think back to that dysfunctional, squabbling family again, and the pall it must have cast over the sisters' lives. MK might have done the deed, but Constance was certainly complicit. Uncle J. has told us she wasn't that quick about summoning help; she it was who bought the arsenic in the first place (to kill rats, she says); and she has known the truth all these years...

And, as Sarah Perry points out, we're not nearly as horrified as we should be: "At all times you’re aware that a great crime has been committed, a great tragedy. And you gradually find out where that lies and where it comes from. By then, your emotions and sympathies are engaged to such an extent that you’re forced into being complicit. That’s what I find exciting about it. It challenges your idea about what wickedness is and who you can sympathise with."



***

And now we've reached the final chapter. In which the sisters reach a kind of mythological status. Children start venturing into the quiet grounds. But the sisters complete their barricade, and stay hidden.

One day, two people bring food. There's a note: "I broke one of your chairs and I'm sorry..." It becomes a habit. Different people, different dishes, different apologies.

More and more people are coming to spend time in the grounds. One says: "No one knows for sure if there’s anyone inside or not. The local people tell some tall tales." Stories have gone round that the women hunt or poison children.

Charles returns. But the women still betray no sign of their presence. He retreats, and they laugh:

"We held each other in the dark hall and laughed, with the tears running down our cheeks and echoes of our laughter going up the ruined stairway to the sky.
"'I am so happy,' Constance said at last, gasping. 'Merricat, I am so happy.'
"'I told you that you would like it on the moon.'

So they continue in this broken house, happy, living off the produce of their garden, which they harvest in secret. Sometimes the children get a bit daring. But then there's a propitiatory offering.

"We learned from listening," MK tells us, "that all the strangers could see from outside, when they looked at all, was a great ruined structure overgrown with vines, barely recognizable as a house. It was the point halfway between the village and the highway, the middle spot on the path, and no one ever saw our eyes looking out through the vines."

The final sentence repeats: "'Oh, Constance,' I said, 'we are so happy.'"



***

What a book... It kind of lingers with you...

Jonathan Lethem, in an introduction to the 2006 edition, writes: "The relentless, undeniable core of her writing... conveys a vast intimacy with everyday evil, with the pathological undertones of prosaic human configurations: a village, a family, a self. She disinterred the wickedness in normality, cataloguing the ways conformity and repression tip into psychosis, persecution, and paranoia, into cruelty and its masochistic, injury-cherishing twin."

He goes on to explain how Jackson's experience in North Bennington, Vermont (on which the locality in Castle is based), might explain her predilection for these themes: "Jackson lived there most of her adult life, the faculty wife of literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, who taught at nearby Bennington College. Jackson was in many senses already two people when she arrived in Vermont. The first was a fearful ugly duckling, cowed by the severity of her upbringing by a suburban mother obsessed with propriety. This half of Jackson was a character she brought brilliantly to life in her stories and novels from the beginning: the shy girl, whose identity slips all too easily from its foundations. The other half of Jackson was the expulsive iconoclast, brought out of her shell by her marriage to Hyman... and by the visceral shock of mothering a quartet of noisy, demanding babies. This was the Shirley Jackson that the town feared, resented and, depending on whose version you believe, occasionally persecuted. For it was her fate, as an eccentric newcomer in a staid, insular village, to absorb the reflexive anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism felt by the townspeople toward the college. The hostility of the villagers helped shape Jackson’s art, a process that eventually redoubled, so that the latter fed the former... In Castle, Jackson revisits persecution with force and a certain amount of glee, decanting it from the realm of objective social critique into personal fable."



***

To close, a couple more thoughts from insightful people:

-- The Gothic Library: "Though the story is set in the Northeast, We Have Always Lived in the Castle takes on a theme that is often central in the Southern Gothic subgenre: the decay of the upper class. The Blackwoods are a wealthy, upperclass family, with a fine house and extensive property. They look down on the villagers as being socially beneath them, and the only people allowed to call at the house are other members of high society who drive in from out of town. But all this wealth, money, and status is ultimately meaningless to the remaining Blackwoods... Their vault full of money becomes useless once Merricat stops going into town to spend it. Meanwhile, the dilapidation and partial destruction of the house serves as an outward manifestation of the fate awaiting the Blackwood family, and perhaps the American aristocracy more broadly."

-- Carpenter gives us a robustly feminist (and pretty credible) take on the story: "Female self-sufficiency, Jackson suggests, specifically women's forceful establishment of power over their own lives, threatens a society in which men hold primary power and leads inevitably to confrontation... Jackson's last completed novel... is her most radical statement on the causes and consequences of female victimization and alienation, a theme that runs throughout her work. The novel may represent a personal culmination for Jackson, who suffered a nervous breakdown shortly after its publication in 1962; her journal from that period records longings for 'freedom and security,' 'self-control,' and 'refuge' that echo the novels central concern with the self-determination of women in a safe environment."

At first the women's power is curtailed by their patriarchal family. After the deaths, they're faced with the hostility of the villagers. And then they have to contend with Charles's attempted seizure of power: "The confrontation of the fire scene is necessary to prove to Constance what Merricat has always believed -- that heterosexual romance is a dangerous illusion, that patriarchy is an inherently destructive institution, and that no compromise is possible. Just as Constance has always felt a responsibility to take care of Merricat, to be a kind of mother to her, so Merricat has always felt a responsibility to protect Constance from an outside world her sister has not clearly understood, a world of hatred and violence." Their ultimate isolation paradoxically gives them a position of power.

All up, fantastically readable, with layers and layers of interpretative potential. Brava!