One of my first memories of myself is me reading on the veranda at my grandparents’ place – I must have been four, possibly five. As long as I can remember, I have been one of the Reading Girls. You know the type: precocious, slightly awkward, unseen by boys, always, everywhere reading – hungry for something different, other places, other lives.

It gets more and more difficult to feel the same overwhelming, heady excitement about books that I used to. I think it’s one of the reasons I read so much fantasy and science fiction these days, as these genres provide a short-cut to that feeling of difference. But sometimes, the wonder is still there. The last time I felt it was reading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

“My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death- cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.”

This is the opening paragraph of the book and it’s all you need to know about what is going to happen, about what is happening, about what has happened. Blurbs and those neat little summaries in reviews – they are necessary evils, I suppose, but they always ruin the book at least a little. In this case, they ruin it too much. Not that this book would fall apart when a twist is spoiled, but if you know too much, you’ll miss some of the beauty of how the story unravels. If you can, don’t even read further, just read the book.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle reminded me of To Kill a Mockingbird and Neil Gaiman’s* books, although it isn’t LIKE them. There are some obvious similarities (the adolescent narrator, the general feeling of unease), but a more fundamental affinity, too. It is a slim volume, perfectly constructed. The language is beautiful: not in the sense of being elaborately poetic, but it’s incredibly precise and well-observed. Every single sentence has a place, has a reason for being and means something, as opposed to simply describing what happens. In this respect, it makes me think of Margaret Atwood.

If you went and read one of those reviews I warned you against, they might have told you that Mary Katherine is an unreliable narrator. I don’t think that’s quite it. I think she considers us to be beneath her notice, she just says exactly what she pleases and when she pleases. If we are not able to put all the pieces together right away, that’s our problem. And while Merricat tells the story in a matter-of-fact way, the way she knows it to be, this is of course only her version – but it’s the case with every narrator, reliable or not.

We will have most the facts by the end of the book, but we have to make sense of them ourselves. There is a curious psychological and moral vacuum: motivations are not explained, judgement is not given. It is one of the great successes of the book, I think. The readers will need to decide, why things happened, who is innocent and who is guilty, if people are good or evil, if love is indeed always beautiful or sometimes obscene. It is up to us to believe that the ending is happy. Or not.

* I have not read The Lottery, as I’m too scared, but there seems to be a pretty clear parallel with one of the most memorable episodes in American Gods.