We Have Always Lived in the Castle

WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE (Shirley Jackson) - Four Stars

(This review has spoilers. Since this novel hinges more on atmosphere and personality than plot twists, I do not feel that disclosing them will ruin the experience for those who have yet to read the novel. However, it's your call to make.)

Mary Katherine (Merricat), her sister Constance, and their Uncle Julian live on the Blackwood Estates. The rest of the wealthy Blackwood family all perished at a family dinner laced with arsenic. Merricat, who had been sent to bed without supper, escaped their fate. Constance, who cooked the meal, was arrested, charged, and eventually acquitted of the murders (this last part earned her the everlasting enmity of the town's public, leading her to become acutely agoraphobic). Uncle Julian was the only person to survive the poisoning, though it left him physically and mentally crippled.

My first impulse was to classify this as a novel with an unreliable narrator. I don't think that's quite accurate, though: NO ONE in the novel is reliable. Part of the fun in reading this short novel is trying to catch the nuggets of truth that drift by in rivers of fantasy and dementia. The narrator is eighteen-year old Merricat, a flighty young girl with a vivid imagination and a rather shocking psychopathic streak. Kind of a twisted amalgamation of Alice (in Wonderland) and Wednesday Addams. The novel isn't scary but rather creepy, and the creepiness comes in no small part from Merricat, who one moment will be mulling over nature and her belief in sympathetic magic and the next moment wishing death upon someone with chilling casualness.

The other fun thing about this book is that it asks (or rather, implies) far more questions than it answers. When it's finally revealed that it was Merricat, not Constance, that murdered their entire family (a twist that is visible from miles away), one must ask why Constance felt compelled to take the fall for her sister. And what was Merricat's motive, if there was one? During Constance's trial, with the rest of the family dead, Merricat was sent to an orphanage. This, I feel, is a key point in the story (not just because it is brought up time and time again), but even still Ms. Jackson doesn't elaborate. What happened in the orphanage? Because something obviously did. Despite talking directly to her many times throughout the story, during one meal Uncle Julian shouts out that Constance is his only niece, that his other niece died in an orphanage. Merricat quite obviously isn't a ghost; does this signify that Julian is well aware of who really poisoned every one, a way of "disowning" Merricat? Or is it simply a dementia-spurred outburst from an arsenic-addled mind? On the other hand, the crippling agoraphobia of Constance and Merricat isn't really addressed at all: just accepted as part of reality.

In the end, I suppose it's irrelevant to the story. The point of the novel is not to unravel the mystery of the Blackwoods, but to witness how the Blackwood sisters cope with the aftermath.

You Suck

YOU SUCK (Christopher Moore) - Three Stars

I really wanted to give the sequel to Bloodsucking Fiends four stars, because I like Moore's writing and the book was very funny and tremendously entertaining, but...

Well, one of the main problems in creating wonderful characters is that readers get annoyed when you under-utilize them. Part of Moore's problem here is that he tries to wedge a cast of thousands into a 328-page book: Jody, Tommy, Elijah, Blue, Abby, Jared, Steven, Rivera, Cavuto, William, the Emperor, the Animals (what, 5-6 of them)... that's, what, eighteen people with the better part of at least one chapter dedicated to them. The book comes across as a little unfocused, and the ensemble play doesn't quite work.

The best new character, by far, is "Abby Normal," a brilliantly written stereotype of a teenage goth. Even still, she kind of usurps the main character duties from Jody and Tommy in the last several chapters and becomes a bit overused. I was disappointed that the two most interesting characters in the book, Jody and Elijah (not Tommy, who is whiny and never knows what to do, but always conveniently makes a bad snap-judgment when the plot needs it), did not get even more face time.

The ending to the book was tremendously disappointing, but it did leave the door wide open for another sequel (which, hopefully, will be written).

Finally, this book was a bit of a let-down for its change of tone from its predecessor. Bloodsucking Fiends was first and foremost a vampire novel, with detailed, quirky characters that I found great affection for. Vampirism, a concept that has been done and overdone a million times in literary circles, was given a little twist and treated in a fairly novel, interesting fashion. Comedy was thrown in on top of that in large quantities, but it was still only icing on the cake. The formula worked marvelously. You Suck is simply a comedy; all of the atmosphere and creativity of the first novel is disdainfully abandoned for an overdose of wacky hijinks, and vampirism is no longer treated as a complicated aspect of a character's personality but rather as a clothesline upon which to hang cheap gags.