There's no way to lock the doors, and it wouldn't help anyway.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
After arsenic killed most of their family, two sisters barricade themselves against the village that despises them.
190g
Weighs the same as Banana + Compass
- Lightweight
- Past Bedtime
- Fiction/Gothic
Merricat Blackwood, eighteen, lives with her sister and ailing uncle—the rest of the family died six years ago, arsenic in the sugar bowl—despised by the local villagers. Merricat protects their ritualistic life using buried marbles, magical charms, and fierce devotion. But when an estranged cousin arrives with eyes on the family fortune, their sanctuary shatters. Jackson makes you love the strangest household in American fiction. Save this upside-down haunted house story for nights alone in the tent; there's no way to lock the doors, and it wouldn't help anyway.
Field notes
Published in 1962, this was Jackson's final completed novel. In North Bennington, Vermont, where she lived, Jackson and her Jewish husband encountered antisemitism and hostility toward outsiders. Her final novel turns that experience into an inverted Gothic: the house is a refuge, while the village beyond its gates becomes the source of terror. Jackson imagined Merricat and Constance as two halves of a single identity, one fiercely defending the household, the other afraid to leave it. Shortly after completing the novel, Jackson suffered a breakdown that left her largely housebound.