We Have Always Lived in the Castle

The style of the novel is simple but macabre, befitting the eccentric personality of its narrator, Merricat Blackwood. Though she is 18 years old at the start of the novel, she is often preoccupied with toys and superstitions, and she writes in the manner of a younger child, which suggests that she has remained somewhat immature as a result of her long isolation from the world beyond her family home. The famous opening lines of the novel reflect the style of the novel more broadly: 

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 deathcup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.

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