The ending is what I remembered, but I don't remember finding it so strange and unbelievable. Still, the further the story goes, the further it is from reality. Though Mary Katherine believes in magic, and tries to create magic protection for herself, this one isn't a supernatural story. Though Mary Katherine calls her cousin Charles a ghost, this one isn't a ghost story. This isn't the quirky imaginative heroine who faces down the hateful townfolk and her encroaching cousin that I remember: this is a phobic young woman who tries to use to ritual to try to control her world, who is disturbed and disturbing! After listening to this recording, I found myself questioning my earlier interpretation of the whole story. She has a kind of tremor of fear in her voice right from the start. I was surprised at how Bernadette Dunne voiced the narrator character. I first read this book as a kid and at the time identified with the teenage Mary Katherine, without questioning her as an "unreliable narrator." When I got the audiobook all these years later, I thought it would be fun to revisit a story I had liked. Jackson’s novel emerges less as a study in eccentricity and more-like some of her other fictions-as a powerful critique of the anxious, ruthless processes involved in the maintenance of normalcy itself. Unable to drive him away by either polite or occult means, Merricat adopts more desperate methods, resulting in crisis, tragedy, and the revelation of a terrible secret. But one day a stranger arrives-cousin Charles, with his eye on the Blackwood fortune-and manages to penetrate into their carefully shielded lives.
Merricat has developed an idiosyncratic system of rules and protective magic to guard the estate against intrusions from hostile villagers. Six years after four family members died suspiciously of arsenic poisoning, the three remaining Blackwoods-elder, agoraphobic sister Constance wheelchair-bound Uncle Julian and eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine, or, Merricat-live together in pleasant isolation.
Shirley Jackson’s deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family takes readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, macabre humor, and gothic atmosphere.
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