We Have Always Lived in the Castle

By: Shirley Jackson / Narrated By: Bernadette Dunne

Length: 5 hrs and 32 mins

Bernadette Dunne knocks this outta the park!

Shirley Jackson is sooo good! Only she can take what seems to be a simple story and then add layer to layer until one winds up with a brilliantly-crafted genius of a book. And in the audiobook production of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Bernadette Dunne takes a great story and fleshes it out ever so much deeper with a truly stellar and heartbreaking performance.

Things start out slowly enough: We get that nobody likes the Blackwood family from the way the townsfolk treat Merricat Blackwood; all conversation is fraught with innuendo and the teasing is mean and goes beyond spiteful to downright hateful. Then we’re teased a bit more by the fact that Constance, Merricat’s sister, doesn’t leave the house, hasn’t in six years. She stays in the garden, where she’s a genius with all things that grow. And THEN we get even more tantalizing tidbits from their Uncle Julian who is elderly and wheelchair bound and who lives in the past, talking ceaselessly of “that day” so long ago. “I wonder if she would’ve done things differently if she knew it was her last day? I wonder if my brother would’ve spoken like that if he knew it was their last day?” he muses, over and over and over.

Turns out the family was murdered with arsenic and Constance was arrested and tried for the crime. Merricat survived as she’d been naughty and had been sent to bed without her dinner, the dinner, where sugar laced with arsenic, was served.

There is one well-meaning townswoman, but for the most part, the town doesn’t want to have anything to do with the surviving Blackwoods, and especially not with the woman they feel got away with murder.

But through Jackson’s writing, we start to feel that people just want to be hateful, and things start coming to a head when their cousin, once estranged, comes back to mend fences and winds up being domineering.

What I like is the emotion that comes through Dunne’s narration. Merricat, who, if you simply read the book in print, can come of as unreliable and unstable, is actually a very disturbed girl, but the emotion in Dunne’s voice brings her to life as a young girl in desperate pain. Each ritual she performs is done in agonies as she tries to fend off even worse happenings.

Jackson slowly ratchets up the tension, notch by painful notch, to where things reach a boiling point, and then she drops a bombshell on the listener. You’re holding your breath, holding your breath, you gasp with surprise, and then she adds even more tension while you’re still trying to breathe.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle works soooooo well as an audiobook; I much prefer it to the print version. Brava to Shirley Jackson!

Brava to Bernadette Dunne!!!! Huzzah!