Shirley Jackson

I'm reading a fantastic book right now, called We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson, of "The Lottery" fame. It's a classic tale of eerie dread with a possibly unreliable narrator, who veers from having a winsome, uncanny sense of imagination to seeming possibly murderous and psychotic. The plot focuses on a prim and proper family in a small isolated village who live in an almost empty mansion. They're hated by the locals, at least as far as the incredibly alienated narrator is concerned. The family is reduced to the ghostly Mary Katherine or Merricat, who claims to be eighteen but often feels much younger, her older sister Constance, whom she idolizes and adores, and their infirm and senile uncle Julian. Everyone else in their family is dead, and they are cut off from the rest of their extended family. The only people they ever see are a few rich friends, of Suitable Society, who occasionally come to visit and have gruesomely formal, icy and bloodless "social" visits. It come sout that the entire family was poisoned, and Constance, the older sister was tried but found innocent, and the townspeople still suspect them.
Mary Katherine becomes more and more unhinged, more unearthly seeming as the story continues. She plays little fairytale games that border on neurotic and/or paranoid delusions. But, whereas a horror hack like Stephen King would simply make Mary Katherine a raving loon with Creepy Little Girl in Horror Story behaviors, the tics that Merricat displays are perfectly suited to the kind of world she's been consigned to. She is terrified of change, of Constance "growing up" and leaving her to pursue an adult life, getting married and so on. So Merricat tells herself that she can use three "magic" words to protect her world from changing. She chooses three words and, as long as no one says them out loud, she will be safe. She speaks the first word into a glass of water and drinks the water, whispers the enxt to her dessert and eats the dessert, and so forth. She picks words that her uncle would not be likely to say. When it becomes obvious that change is actually coming, she speaks the words outloud, breaking the spell (to protect herself from the realization that the words don't really hold any special properties?) What a creepy conceit, and what a perfect metaphor for the icy Stepford like locale Jackson is describing: the Blackwoods' lives are reduced to nothing but socializing, little luncheons where people chitchat but don;t really communicate. They convince themselves that by not talking about it, their problems will go away. That by throwing little parties and eating cakes, they can restore their lost social status and make their existences bearable again. They do nothing except talk and eat, and yet they see the utility, the emptiness of this existence.