The Fall of the House of Usher
The archetypal gothic tale and a masterclass in atmosphere studied by horror writers ever since.
Book Entry · Horror
What is We Have Always Lived in the Castle about?
Mary Katherine 'Merricat' Blackwood — eighteen, feral, given to sympathetic magic and the wish that everyone in the village were dead — lives with her agoraphobic sister Constance and ailing Uncle Julian in the family house, the rest of the Blackwoods having died six years earlier of arsenic in the sugar bowl. Constance was acquitted; the village has not acquitted anyone. Cousin Charles arrives with his eye on the safe, and Merricat takes measures. Jackson's last completed novel is her most perfect: a fairy tale told from inside the witch's cottage, with one of fiction's great unreliable narrators keeping house at the centre.
Why it matters
Jackson's masterpiece by many measures and a permanent influence on the literature of strange sisters and besieged houses — its Merricat voice echoes through modern gothic from Carmen Maria Machado's generation backwards.
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