Arsenic in the sugar

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson is about family, and murder, and the inexplicable cruelty of ordinary people.

Constance, 28, is ladylike and agoraphobic. She never goes beyond the garden. Her sister Merricat (as 18-year-old Mary Katherine is called) is fey, hostile, conscienceless, and just plain weird. Merricat is our narrator; it's through her questionably-reliable eyes we see the events of this novel. Constance and Merricat have lived alone, with their damaged uncle Julian, since terrible events destroyed their family six years ago.

Merricat loves their isolation. Any change in the status quo upsets and angers her, and she has an obsessive system of magical safeguards all over the property: locked gates, books nailed to trees, buried teeth. Constance, too, has her protective rites: wholesome meals on matching china and grandmother's silver service. "We will take our meals like ladies," she says, in the midst of chaos. Gradually the sisters come to seem like refugees, ritualistically assuring themselves that life is normal and safe.

But their life is not normal, and they are far from safe.

Shirly Jackson was herself agoraphobic; for long periods she was unable to leave her bedroom. Her books and stories are peopled with women who cannot escape their fear - who, sometimes, embrace it. None have the sweet, shocking remorselessness of Merricat Blackwood.

I've written before about Jackson; I loved her earlier novel, The Haunting of Hill House. That book is a shining pearl of a ghost story, a perfect example of a very familiar genre. We Have Always Lived in the Castle is genreless and unique. It's a shot of distilled female anxiety and rage, and it burns as it goes down.