We have always lived in the castle
Six years on from a devastating arsenic poisoning that killed four members of the Blackwood family, the three who remain have built a strange, cloistered existence for themselves. Constance, the eldest sister, rarely ventures beyond the estate walls. Uncle Julian, confined to his wheelchair, circles obsessively around the past. Then there's eighteen-year-old Merricat, our narrator, who has constructed her own peculiar system of rituals and buried charms to hold the outside world at bay. It's an odd little fortress, but it works. Until it doesn't. A cousin named Charles arrives uninvited, his eyes fixed firmly on the family's money rather than its wellbeing. He worms his way into their guarded routines with unsettling ease, and Merricat, having exhausted both social and supernatural means of dislodging him, takes matters into her own hands. What follows is a slow unravelling: crisis piled upon tragedy, and finally a secret that reframes everything you thought you understood about this quiet, peculiar household. Jackson writes with a deceptively gentle hand, but there's something deeply unsettling humming beneath every page. A short novel that lingers far longer than its length would suggest.
- Author: Shirley Jackson
- Publisher: Grapevine India
- Genre: Horror
- ISBN: 978-9394752139
- Pages: 133 pages