we have always lived in the castle pages

If you just take her at face value, she can't be much more than a scared, stunted girl throwing temper tantrums, and that's essentially what she becomes in the film. Merricat's unreliable nature, the way her own sense of passivity sits at odds with her actual role in the Blackwood power dynamic, is another tough thing to pull off onscreen. But she's pretty worked up even before he arrives, wilting from the effort of running errands in the village.

Merricat naturally hates Charles, as he represents a threat to her carefully conceived order of the house. But Sebastian Stan, as the dashing cousin Charles who shows up at the house to woo Constance and make a stab at the family fortune, is never quite able to pull off the duplicitous charm of this strange new interloper. Two men are also in the picture: Crispin Glover is always halfway to disturbed, so he makes a fine Uncle Julian, the girls' dithering relative who was paralyzed by the poison attack and now spends his days obsessively recreating that deadly dinner in his memoirs. Taissa Farmiga plays Merricat with her anxieties front and center, blindly battling a world she doesn't understand, while Alexandra Daddario makes Constance into a beautiful, naive waif whose cluelessness practically renders her a ghost.

It's a shame, then, that director Stacie Passon (who previously helmed the erotic drama Concussion) makes the creepy stuff too low-key, less a case of building dread than growing impatience. But any adaptation that can't sell this central hook will put the story's other elements - Constance's sexual repression and the public's simmering hatred of the Blackwoods chief among them - out of whack. How do you make two mysterious figures behind the curtains look so drab? I don’t know, but they accomplished it.This mystery is tough to render on film, because it's so dependent on the inner mindsets of the characters. If you put Stephen King’s name on it, I’d probably believe it was an edition of Carrie - even though I don’t remember her having a cat. There have been so many other covers - see them all for yourself!Īctually, I’m pretty sure this is the house from Jackson’s other isolated family novel, The Sundial. Keep reading to see the best and worst cats, castles, sisters, and more!Īnd there you have it, the best and worst covers for Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. So I have gone through them all and selected the very best (and the very worst) covers for We Have Always Lived in the Castle, categorized by who - or what - the cover depicts. There have been many, many editions of this, my favorite novel, and some of the covers have been…choices.

We have always lived in the castle pages