Shirley Jackson's Most Disturbing Book Isn't 'The Haunting of Hill House'
Kelcie Mattson is a Senior Features author at Collider. Based in the Midwest, she also contributes Lists, reviews, and television recaps. A lifelong fan of niche sci-fi, high fantasy, Gothic horror, elaborate action, and witty detective fiction, becoming a pop culture devotee was inevitable once the Disney Renaissance, Turner Classic Movies, BBC period dramas, and her local library piqued her imagination.
Rarely seen without a book in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, Kelcie explores media history (especially older, foreign, and independent films) as much as possible. You'll also find her enjoying video games, amateur photography, geeking out over all music genres, admiring birds from her porch, trying to overcome her meager baking skills, and attending fan conventions with her Trekkie family.
The Haunting of Hill House would be an unsurpassable achievement for most authors. In terms of Gothic horror touchstones, the brilliance of Shirley Jackson's novel remains nearly unmatched — a classic ghost story featuring a distressed heroine and a foreboding house marked by human violence and paranormal malevolence, rich with stifling tension and subtle psychological ambiguity. Jackson's astute insights into humanity, her bewitching prose, and her calibrated knack for atmosphere cement her as a genre pioneer with generational skill and matching influence.
If Hill House qualifies as her career-defining title, then even more accolades surround her follow-up novel. The titular building in We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a different breed of haunted residence, but still populated by suffocating claustrophobia. Jackson's last work shows an extraordinary storyteller at the height of her craft, commanding structure, tone, misdirection, and her singular fictional creation. Volatile, disarmingly tender, and impossible to shake, Castle is a chilling tragedy wrapped in lush language and hidden barbed wire.
'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' Is a Gothic Nightmare Without Ghosts
An old house, built by an old-money family, sits on the outskirts of a small American town. The estate belongs to the Blackwoods: Mary Katharine, nicknamed Merricat, her severely agoraphobic sister Constance, and their uncle Julian. The trio are the only survivors of the same unsolved arsenic poisoning that claimed the lives of the siblings' father, mother, brother, and aunt six years earlier. Constance, then 22 years old, was the main suspect before insufficient evidence secured her acquittal. Almost as reclusive as her beloved Constance but more suspicious, 18-year-old Merricat vigilantly monitors for any threat — perceived or genuine — to her family's serene isolation. Her handmade magical wards fail to keep their cousin Charles from trespassing right up to their doorstep. As he ingratiates himself into Constance's good graces, Merricat sees a wealth-seeking predator determined to steal her sole companion.
Supernatural metaphors don't grace Castle's edges. This Gothic fairy tale-turned-nightmare surrounds the everyday evil individuals commit, the inescapable torments of the mind, and the insidious damage both inflict upon women. Social oppression, familial abuse, domestic spheres being safe havens or eternal traps, and rebellious protagonists with complex trauma, anxiety, guilt, and anger are common themes throughout Jackson's oeuvre, and the same holds true for Castle.
In this case, the xenophobic fear of anyone different critiques both ways. The townsfolk have reviled the Blackwoods for years; a ghastly scandal gives them permission to fully unleash their mob-mentality persecution upon a teenage girl. Compared to the exterior world "full of terrible people," at least the sisters' death-filled home and their internalized horrors are predictably familiar. Meanwhile, the younger Blackwood orphan has inherited her aristocratic family's dehumanizing, class-based prejudice — but with excessively bloodthirsty intensity. Merricat silently fantasizes about retaliating through torturous punishment.
Shirley Jackson's 'We Have Always Lived in the Castle' Stars One of Horror's Most Compelling Main Characters
It's through the sisters that Jackson conducts Castle's entrancing character study of two young women and their morbidly sincere love. Merricat and Constance are twin outsiders and complementary opposites, united in the fact that one will move heaven and earth to protect the other. The weight of an unspoken sin binds their toxic adoration even tighter, until they're as inseparable as entangled vines. Merricat is a wealth of enigmatic contradictions, a normal portrait of teenage turmoil yet too naive for 18, and also too disconcertingly ancient to be an ingénue. She's whimsical, sly, intuitive, resourceful, affectionate, remorseless, viper-quick to either petulant fury or all-consuming teror, and viciously possessive of Constance's attention. Merricat needs constant security and absolute control, and employs every available means of bending circumstances to her will.
Appropriately, Jackson keeps readers under Merricat's power. Her first-person perspective dispenses piecemeal the feelings Merricat deigns to share. The rawness of Castle's protagonist ranges from vulnerable to cold-blooded, but she doesn't care to justify her morality or explain her notoriously disobedient refusal to conform to gendered expectations about proper feminine behavior. Jackson invites interpretation by revealing just enough to fascinate and repel.
Where Merricat feels content in their seclusion, Constance is torn between the half-defensive, half-destructive desire to remain self-imprisoned inside her childhood sanctuary and wanting to summon enough courage to step beyond their family's bloodstained threshold. Curiously, she's amused by and sympathetic to her "silly" Merricat rather than frustrated. A caregiver by necessity and choice, Constance seems to accept her sister in her entirety. Only readers can decide if such unconditional love is heartfelt or mortifying.
By the time the two living ghosts are enveloped in an untouchable world that's entirely their own, it's almost a twisted happy ending. Merricat's fantasy has been realized, as if her spells manifested a reality where Constance rejects all other company in favor of staying with Merricat in the ashy ruins of their majestic "castle." Like an avalanche gathering catastrophic speed and force as it descends, their story races forward with hideous inevitability. We Have Always Lived in the Castle doesn't need a literal poltergeist to haunt.
KioskNews shows a cleaned-up reading view extracted from the publisher’s page — the original always lives on their site, not ours.