One of the greats of the ghostly short story ended her career with a haunting, unsettling novel without a spectre in sight

If I could give you one gift this Christmas, it would be a box of silver dollars, buried by the creek. Or perhaps a book nailed to a tree. Maybe a sugar bowl, brimming with arsenic. Perhaps I’d give you a game to play, under your breath, as you negotiated the chessboard of the high street under the accusing glares of the townsfolk.

Or I could give you all these things in one neat package, wrapped in disquiet and tied with unease. I could give you Shirley Jackson’s astonishing final novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Jackson, who died 50 years ago, is perhaps best known for her short story The Lottery and her novel The Haunting of Hill House, twice-filmed and considered to be the last word in haunted-house tales. But while these and the rest of Jackson’s oeuvre are indeed sublime, it is Castle about which I am most evangelical and that I press upon people at every opportunity.

The author was a troubled figure at the end of her life, and Castle, published in 1961, has in its two female lead characters what Jackson’s biographer Judy Oppenheimer calls the “yin and yang of Shirley’s own inner self” – “one, an explorer, a challenger, the other a contented, domestic homebody”. They are Mary Katherine – Merricat – who is 18, headstrong and simultaneously naive and worldly; and older sister Constance, who ventures no further than her garden in the rambling, tumbledown grounds of the Blackwood family home, perched aloof above the small town.

The Blackwood girls are the last surviving remnants of this grand old family, along with Uncle Julian, infirm in body and often in mind. The rest of the dynasty was wiped out when someone put arsenic in the sugar bowl and the family, as was their wont, sprinkled it on dessert.

Merricat had been sent to her room before supper, so had no pudding. Constance took no sugar. And Uncle Julian only a little, so though poisoned with the rest of them he survived, albeit with ailing health.

As one might expect, a mythology grows around the surviving Blackwoods, with Constance generally believed to have committed the murders. After all, did she not wash out the sugar bowl before the police arrived, on the pretext of there being a spider in it?

Only Merricat ventures infrequently into town, to collect groceries and books from the library, and when she does she is greeted by the cruel rhymes of children:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?

Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.

Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?

Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

Unsurprisingly, Merricat is a troubled young woman, marking the bounds of the Blackwood land with fetishes and totems made from scraps and trinkets, fiercely protective of her sister, and marking her days with little OCD rituals.

And thus the dusty stage is set for the inevitable conflict that Jackson injects into this gothic tableau, the introduction of a smooth-talking, gold-digging cousin who flatters Constance into believing she can have a normal life, and the ratcheting up of the tension between the Blackwoods and the townsfolk, who are but a gentle push away from the pitchfork-waving mob they inevitably must become.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is an entrancing, unsettling tale that builds like the pressure pushed ahead of an approaching storm; Jackson weaves words like Merricat makes the talismans that she believes must protect what is left of her family from the outside world. The pressure and tension climbs and climbs towards a climax that is simultaneously unavoidable and shocking.

Part of me doesn’t want to share this book at all – it’s a private passion, a jealously guarded black magic spell. But I would hope that readers new to it might feel, as I did when I first discovered it, a quiet astonishment that such books can and do exist, and that writing can be so masterful. I’m envious of those that read it for the first time, and go on to discover Shirley Jackson’s astounding body of work encompassing the scary, the horrific and the just plain weird.

There isn’t a shred of the supernatural in Castle, though it feels like there is. It’s perhaps a story of what eventually makes the haunted houses so beloved of Jackson, the echoes of violence and emotion that are imprinted on the places in which we live. It’s obsessed with death but brimming over with life, and that’s perhaps the perfect recipe for the making of the best ghosts of all.