Book Review - 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' by Shirley Jackson

I've read this novella three times in my life.

The first was in 2016, when I was perhaps too young and ignorant to "get it", and I found it too weird, boring, or insubstantial. The second was a couple of years ago, during my worst mental health period and spiral, and where my sensitivity faculties were up by the thousands, so reading a horror book probably wasn't a good idea then, nor good for me to make a formal, openminded judgement and opinion of the piece. The third time, in 2025, in a safe, informed space, with my mind clear and unimpaired, and with no skimming, I can finally determine that 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle', by the complex and complicated but no doubt brilliant Shirley Jackson, is a classic gothic horror novella I like, even though I don't quite understand why.

I guess that is part of its power. Its strange, eerie, unsettling allure. It is 100%, sensibly, sensationally Shirley Jackson, especially in the last years of her life.

I completed my third read when it is coming up to October, as well. Happy early Samhain, the season and wheel of dark nights and veils!

'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' is like the most macabre, odd, byzantine, cynical, short adult fairy tale, in which uninformed outsiders may decry it as immoral, horrific, self-indulgent, and toxic, but we of the inner reading circle understand it and its genius.

There is nothing overtly supernatural about it, but that underlining sense of "This could happen", that is a horror that stays with its reader. Its true horrors lurk beneath the surface.

True goth girls, "misunderstood" girls, may be sure to like it. It is heretical, in ways I wouldn't necessarily say are good or moral, exactly, but they are enjoyable.

Enjoyably morbid. 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' is like a black comedy soaked in venomous blackberry tea. It is ethereal, streams of consciousness escapism, bordering on "madness" that is satisfying, validating and affirming.

Therein lie poisons, poisonous mushrooms, woods, lots of housecleaning, lots and lots of food and eating (in the garden and the kitchen), "protections" around a big old house, buried knickknacks and other random stuff by a deeply disturbed child - who considers herself a witch and better than everyone else (she might, in fact, be right, but of course that doesn't excuse her narcissistic and... fatalistic tendencies) - and greedy family members, and the worst, most hostile village people you can ever encounter. Arguably, they are even more animalistic and primeval than the village pariahs, the surviving Blackwoods in their landmark Blackwood mansion, who are each disturbed in different ways.

Shirley Jackson's disposition as an outsider in "civilised" suburban society, and her disdain for smalltown people and their conformity, conservatism, ignorance, and ugly, miserable, dead-eyed, hateful narrowmindedness towards anyone different, definitely shows here.

One exquisite detail I never noticed until my third read is that Mary Katherine "Merricat" Blackwood (love that name), our disturbed, unhinged, morbid, obsessive, curse-giving protagonist, who at eighteen years old hasn't grown up past twelve years or even younger, repeatedly thinks throughout the book that she will remember be kind to her traumatised, invalid Uncle Julian, but she never even speaks to him directly, ever, nor does Uncle Julian interact with her, despite them living together. Symbolically and literally, they are ghosts to each other. It is Merricat's poor older sister Constance who acts as their mediator; it is she who they both speak to, in what remains of their family after the arsenic dinner tragedy six years prior.

All the burden is on Constance. It falls on the angelic, traumatised, vulnerable, servile, domesticated, agoraphobic Constance, who is controlled and abused by Merricat, to keep them and their home together, futile and fruitless as it is.

Merricat's cat Jonas, who is her familiar in a great sense, is just one of her obsessions - her compulsive obsessions. As part of her unchanging, habitual routines. Her biggest fixation is her sister Constance, who dotes on her, enables her, depends on her, and both loves and fears her. Literally everybody else can drop dead and Merricat would not care.

In this story, as with all of Shirley Jackson's stories, everything is broken, both at home and in society in general. It is the nasty, melancholic, bored and broken people that make it so. No kind of conceptual "order" and "normalcy" and convention is fooling anyone. Not anymore.

In 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle', it is bleak and blunt, doom and gloom, yet with a... happy fairy tale ending? It is hard to explain without spoilers, but damn is it clever, and... hopeful and feminist?

It is a very weird book. It is one of the reasons to admire it, without quite knowing the other reasons why.

'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' is shadowy and grim, and biting, sickle-sharp social satire. It may be a mixed bag for me overall - despite its short length, it contains loads of descriptions of everything, and not much happens in the story itself, and there are various nitpicks and instances of uneasiness in the writing that have nothing to do with horror - but I appreciate and admire it nonetheless. It is absolutely, fundamentally unique, and a magnum opus in classic feminist gothic horror.

It is a strange cup of tea, but I can't deny that it is, deeply, subconsciously, my kind of cup of tea.

I have read many of Jackson's works this year, including her short stories, but my favourite of hers remains 'The Haunting of Hill House', followed closely by 'The Lottery' and now 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle', at last after a few tries within nearly a decade.

I will end my review by adding that Shirley Jackson's obsession with food has extremely likely never been more prominent than in this, her final book. Anything that is edible, and how it is procured, be it via farming or going to the supermarket, and where it is stored, and how it is prepared for eating, it is all described in overabundant, overindulgent detail in most pages.

The copy of 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' I bought online (I remember the second time reading it was of a library copy; now I officially own my own copy) is, unfortunately, the 2009 Penguin Modern Classics version, with the embarrassingly dated and inaccurate Afterword by Joyce Carol Oates (nothing against her personally; she seems like a decent, well adjusted, common sense person otherwise). However, one of the few things she got right about 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' is: 'In much of Shirley Jackson's fiction food is fetishized to an extraordinary degree' (page 154), and it is an 'erotic component'. It is the closest that Jackson's stories come to being "sexual", at least in what is shown on page. And boy did she love to show them on page.

Food as fixation and fetishization is a theme in pretty much all of Jackson's literature, which, taking into account her well documented eating disorder, obesity, alcoholism and other addictive behaviours, only worsening until her death, it makes sense, in reflecting on the author's own life, as she projected her obsessions and coping mechanisms into her writing. There's also her agoraphobia, projected onto the character of Constance Blackwood. And it works in adding to her unsettling, suburban horror, of "order" and subservience, yet excessive indulgence; less out of hunger and more out of compulsive sating out of emptiness and depression.

Finis, my review and personal journey through 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' is done. It has been a long time coming, but hopefully, older and wiser as I have become in my reading, in my thirties, it was worth the wait.

Final Score: 3/5