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 death-cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead…
Read from June 12, 2021 – June 14, 2021
What do you get when you mix a budding psychopath, her agoraphobic sister, and their very confused uncle? A Shirley Jackson book, of course! And a damn good one at that.
This review will contain spoilers.
Like The Haunting of Hill House, this is a character-driven book. Not much happens, and the big reveal isn’t meant to be very surprising. Instead, these pages are mostly filled with snippets of the everyday lives of Merricat, Constance, Uncle Julien, and their cat, Jonas. I found them all to be extremely endearing; I loved their odd rituals and silly conversations. However, I suspect I would’ve felt very differently if this book was told from a different perspective. Merricat, our narrator, is straight-up homicidal. She’s constantly wishing that the people from the village were dead (which I don’t blame her for), and she killed the majority of her family because she didn’t like them punishing her for doing wicked things (which I do blame her for). But, despite all this, I couldn’t help but adore her. It’s the power of perspective, I guess. We experience everything through her eyes, and therefore all her oddities seem adorable and quirky. But, if you really think about it, she’s extremely morbid and kind of evil. She’s also very selfish and impulsive, willing to commit some truly heinous acts to get what she wants (often without remorse). She is childish, yes, but it’s hard to dislike her because she’s also childlike. She breaks things when she’s mad and doesn’t care about consequences, but she’s also imaginative and her magical spells and secret hideouts are all so charming. And this isn’t just the case with Merricat, you can do this same exercise with Constance and Uncle Julien. Constance may come across as gentle and motherly, but you can also view her as feeble, constantly enabling bad behaviour. And Uncle Julien’s little ravings and forgetfulness may seem all cute and fun, but he’s stuck in the past and very obviously mentally unwell. These characters are complex and easily the best parts of this book.
… I never turned; it was enough to feel them all there without looking into their flat grey faces with hating eyes. I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, “Never let them see that you care,” and “If you pay attention they’ll only get worse,” and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.
Along with the ability to craft great characters, Shirley Jackson is (or was, I guess) immensely talented when it comes to building atmosphere. This book is so unsettling and eerie despite taking place in a seemingly harmless domestic setting, and there’s always this sense that something is not quite right. A part of this book that illustrates this so well is when Merricat is going about her day as normal, but she’s also describing the arrival of Charles at the same time; I was so tense when reading this sequence and everything about it is so creepy. However, Jackson balances this tension and moodiness with some humour, and I love the almost playful quality her writing has sometimes.
The last thing I wanted to talk about is the way Shirley Jackson develops themes. I finished The Lottery and Other Stories right before reading this; that book and this book really showcase Jackson’s critical view of society. This book relies heavily upon the idea of us vs. them, and it serves as a warning of the dangers of mob mentality. The hatred the village has for the Blackwood family forces them to isolate themselves in their home, but it’s not enough for them. As soon as they get the chance to invade their sanctuary, they take it forcefully. I was utterly horrified when everyone started destroying the Blackwood house, and I tried to convince myself that this level of cruelty is only fictional. But, of course, you see this sort of senseless hostility every day in real life. While it may not always be as dramatic as it was in this book, people will do terrible things simply because the person next to them is doing them. It’s troubling to think about how afraid we are of social consequences, and how easily we disregard our private beliefs when they are incongruent with group norms. I deeply appreciate and admire the way Jackson boldly uses her storytelling to reveal these painful realities, and after reading her books I always find myself reflecting upon my actions and the choices I have made in the past.
This book is delightfully strange and disturbing and I loved it so much. It was tough deciding whether I liked this or The Haunting of Hill House more, but the combination of dysfunctional family dynamics and gothic fiction ultimately reigned supreme (plus I much prefer the ending of this one). 5 Amanita phalloides / 5
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