Shirley Jackson’s novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle raises questions like: what if my little sister was a murderous psychopath? And: how burned down does a house have to be before we’ll move out? And: Why do the villagers hate our family so much?

The last question is because of the first one, really. Merricat poisoned most of her family and killed them. It’s not even really clear why. Because she got sent to bed without any supper? What had she done? None of that matters because Merricat is the narrator so we see what she sees. She hates and fears the villagers because they hate and fear her. She loves Constance, her older sister, who doesn’t like sugar on blackberries and so did not get poisoned, and Uncle Julian, who only got poisoned a little, so is stuck in a wheelchair with his mind wandering.

It’s Cousin Charles she hates the most. He comes sniffing around after the family money and after Constance. Merricat wrecks his room, and when he sends her to bed without any supper, she drops the lit pipe he left upstairs into a wastepaper basket full of newspapers, setting the house on fire, burning the upper floor, but getting rid of Charles, so it was worth it.

Jackson excels at letting people’s secret savagery out. She gives us incredibly nosy and inappropriate visitors, outrageously rude villagers, a fire chief who puts the fire out then throws a rock and smashes a window in the house he just saved, a raging mob of villagers who smash and destroy everything in the house they can get their hands on. But most of all she gives us Merricat, who calmly says that she wishes these people were dead—and that she would walk on their bodies.

What if we said what we actually thought and acted on our real feelings? What if we stopped being civilized?

This is a huge book to tackle and I still don’t know quite how to feel about it. I love an unreliable narrator so much, especially a true psychopath. And I love a Gothic house and a town that loses control of itself.

Other texts mentioned: The Esker Road, of course. The Last Word. Summerlands. Sarah Dessen’s Dreamland. I thought about Laurie Halse Anderson’s novels, especially Speak. Judy Blume’s novels. Lois Duncan. It’s no wonder therapists say that most of their job is getting people to say the things that need to be said.