We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

High Gothic Art

Hawthorne, Poe, Lovecraft, and even James: Jackson is in their company when it comes to the Gothic genre. She writes in noir et blanc; every word is necessary; the context is revealed at just the right continuous pace; and there is plenty to reveal. No gimmicks, no spiritualist allusions, no unlikely situations: Jackson puts later writers like Stephen King to shame with her talent and wit.

Someone is a homicidal maniac, but which of the Blackwood sisters is it? The traumatized and agoraphobic Constance, or the obsessive-compulsive and more than slightly mad Mary Katherine? Or perhaps it’s the wheelchair-ridden Uncle Julian who fades in and out of dementia? The victims had their own problems, genetic as well as domestic; who knows but they did each other in. An accident is a possibility - perhaps the ancestors left some lethal material around. Then again, the ‘villagers’ are not a very stable bunch; nor for that matter are the ladies of the local gentry who have more than a morbid curiosity in the family Blackwood. When the sinister cousin Charles come to visit, the question becomes more than academic.

The village itself is part of the mystery. How did it arise as what keeps it going economically? What is the cause of the animosity among the ‘leading families’? Why is the finest house in the village, which should be owned by the Blackwood’s, now a junkyard? There is no uncertainty that the village has some distinctive mores: “In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.” Jackson piles on the complexity at the same rate that she reveals the situation. For every question answered, two more are posed. The first person narrator might be either insane or acutely insightful. It’s a technique guaranteed to keep the reader’s interest.

It’s also a technique which creates a narrative world amazingly efficiently. The questions of the reader are the things the characters themselves are concerned about. The stance of each, his or her position in the puzzle, is who they are. Little further description is necessary. Strangely, how they fit with other is enough for the reader to imagine what they look like, how they dress, what the landscape is like. For example, Jackson characterises the entire village without specifying anything: “All of the village was of a piece, a time, and a style; it was as though the people needed the ugliness of the village, and fed on it.” She adds nothing but a terse negative formula: “whatever planned to be colorful lost its heart quickly in the village.” Nothing more is needed. She provokes participation by the reader who fills in the descriptive gaps like the eye automatically interprets perspective.

This is more than genre horror or fantasy. Jackson writes literary fiction. This is her masterpiece.

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