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Book Reviewed by:Shirley Jackson's beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family's dark secret.
Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Excerpt
We Have Always Lived in the Castle
My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
The last time I glanced at the library books on the kitchen shelf they were more than five months overdue, and I wondered whether I would have chosen differently if I had known that these were the last books, the ones which would stand forever on our kitchen shelf. We rarely moved things; the Blackwoods were never much of a family for restlessness and stirring. We dealt with the small surface transient objects, the books and the flowers and the spoons, but underneath we had ...
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (12/25/2025)
...ng my adventures in unplanned reading), I began with https://www.bookbrowse.com/reviews/index.cfm/book_number/5109/we-have-always-lived-in-the-castle We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, which was a really cool gothic drama. Then I wandered into https://www.bookbrowse.com/bb_briefs/detail/index.cfm/ezine_preview_number/20247/on-the-c...
-kim.kovacs
Am I the only person who does this?
Haha, well, since you asked, @Jill_Mercier , I have time for two from the following list: We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood A Drop of Corruption (second book in a sci-fi series by Robert Jackson Bennett...
-kim.kovacs
What are you reading this week? And what did you think of last week’s books? (12/18/2025)
...ht a ton of books this year and I've read just a fraction of them. Leaning toward Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green, but also on the table are We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, and Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood. (Probably because those are the last three I bought, LOL.) In audiobook format, I'm "reading" The Buffalo Hunter H...
-kim.kovacs
This novel fits firmly within the gothic genre, with its sense of foreboding and domestic setting. But unlike Jackson's other famous gothic work, The Haunting of Hill House, it features no supernatural forces. The horrors of this book hit much closer to home—which makes them even scarier. The monsters of We Have Always Lived in the Castle are normal, otherwise good people who love their families and work hard at their jobs. But when they have the chance to unleash their resentment toward a family they've long hated, they seize it. Jackson, a master of horror, outdoes herself in this book by showcasing the potential for the monstrous that lies within each person...continued
Full Review
(612 words)
(Reviewed by Jillian Bell).
In We Have Always Lived in the Castle, the wealthy Blackwood family lives in a sort of tension with their working-class neighbors. Things reach a boiling point when daughter Constance Blackwood is accused of murdering several of her family members, with the neighbors feeling free to openly mock the now-orphaned Blackwood girls. But as the narrator Merricat Blackwood recounts: "The people of the village have always hated us."
We learn that the other rich families in the area are not pariahs, and are in fact respected. Families like the Clarkes and Carringtons live in "new lovely homes" just outside the village and don't interact frequently with its residents. They send their children to private schools, run most of...
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