"The first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s novel is one of the best character introductions in literature"
The first paragraph of Shirley Jackson’s novel is one of the best character introductions in literature – and what a character Merricat Blackwood is.
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 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 Plantaganet, and Amanita Phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.
Merricat lives with her sister Constance and Uncle Julian outside the village – the rest of her family were poisoned six years ago by arsenic in the sugar. Constance was tried and acquitted, the villagers don’t speak to them, now. They live a charmed, isolated life. Though the two sisters are very different, the love between Constance and Merricat is deeply touching. However, when their cousin Charles arrives, so do discipline and patriarchy.
The book is both grounded and powered by dark sympathetic magic - Merricat buries silver dollars, her baby teeth and blue marbles at various locations on the family property, as ‘safeguards,’ to protect herself and Constance. The eponymous Castle of the title doesn’t materialise until an act of transformation, during the novel’s gloriously odd ending.
| Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
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