We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Every year, I participate in LibraryThing's Secret Santa program, "SantaThing." Members who pay in are matched with other members on the basis of their libraries, and then select books for each other. While some members may write very prescriptive requests ("here are the books on my wish list, please buy me one of them"), I tend to leave things very open; I give a list of authors I am interested in, but note that what I really want is a book my Santa thinks I might like based on what they can see of my tastes.

This means I usually end up with books I don't know much about—and I try to keep it that way. Most things on my reading list end up there because I've read and thought about them a lot, maybe even researched them; most books I go into I know a lot about. But there's a pleasure in coming to a book largely blind, so when possible, I try to make it happen. With SantaThing books, all I typically do is glance at the tag cloud on LT to see what genre I should tag it, and that's it. Last year, for example, that meant I got to experience the weird pleasures of Antkind and The Kingdoms with no expectations ahead of time. The novels unspooled in my consciousness with no guide other than the novels themselves.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson

Originally published: 1962
Acquired: December 2024
Read: January 2025

That worked particularly well with Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle. All I knew going in was that I had once read "The Lottery," and that it was probably vaguely spooky. For all I knew, it was about people living in an actual castle! (Spoiler: it is not.) I've recently been developing a theory that all fiction is (or, perhaps, ought to be) about "epistemic crisis": the world does not work how you thought it did. Or put a slightly different way, you do not know how the world works. Obviously, this is why science fiction is thus the best kind of fiction, because (at its best), it's about figuring out how an unknown world operates. As Jo Walton says, and as I quote her saying quite a lot, science fiction stories are mystery stories where the world itself is the mystery. 

A lot of people on LibraryThing have tagged We Have Always Lived in the Castle as "mystery," but it's not a mystery novel in the sense that it's about a detective or other figure solving a crime. It's a mystery novel in the sense that it is not very clear what is going on in the book, it's not very clear who these people are or what they are doing or why they are doing it. So though We Have Always Live in the Castle is decidedly not science fiction in the sense that it has no scientific divergence from our world, it felt like science fiction to me in the sense that you as the reader have to work out the rules of this strange world you're reading about. It's a mystery where the world itself is the mystery! How is that not science fiction? So for me, going in blind just enhanced the pleasure I got from it.

All this is to say that I NEVER SHOULD HAVE READ THE FIRST SENTENCE OF THE BACK COVER BLURB. I have the 2024 reprint in the "Penguin Modern Classics: Crime & Espionage" series (great cover, by the way), and in big letters at the top of the back cover, it reveals a key ambiguity about the text. Now, thankfully, this didn't catch my eye until I was halfway through the book or so—but I'd still rather have never seen it at all. Yes, it phrases things ambiguously, but in doing so, it makes you think about the question it poses directly, whereas it seemed to me that the power of the novel derived from the slow dawning realization of the reader that this thing the back cover poses must be true. You figure out how the world works—and it's horrifying. But thanks to the back cover, it's more like, "What if the world works x way?" Well, even having it posed as a question means you realize it's possible for the world to work x way, instead of figuring it out for itself.

I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, maybe everyone who's ever read this book went into it know the thing on the back cover. But it seems to me that the pleasure of the book was disrupted by the confirmation you get at the end of chapter 8 not hitting me like a horrifying ton of bricks. Instead I'd known what was going on for several chapters.

Writing this up, it occurs to me that there's actually two epistemic crises in the book (if not more). You (the reader) do not know how the world works. But additionally, the world does not work how you (the protagonist) thought it did. Even as you the reader work to carefully understand Merricat's weird little world, that world is disrupted by the entrance of an outside force, and her understanding begins to break down while yours is simultaneously built up. I hadn't thought of my concept of "epistemic crisis" that way before, but now I'm wondering if that's intrinsic to the way it works in all (the best) science fiction. Are we always simultaneously working to understand the way a world works even as the way that world works is being undermined? I feel like the answer is yes—this would work as a good description of Susanna Clarke's Piranesi, for example. I don't know that I would have thought of putting We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Piranesi together otherwise, but it seems to me that if you like one of them, you would probably like the other.