Word: merricat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...deranged but enchanting mentality that Author Jackson has chosen this time belongs to Mary Katherine ("Merricat") Blackwood-actual age 18, mental age a precocious twelve. "I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet," she reflects, "and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom." She is a gentle child who promises herself to be kinder to her Uncle Julian. She is already kind enough to Constance and to her enigmatic cat Jonas. But for some reason she is never allowed to touch knives...
With bizarre hints and happenings (when Merricat orders a leg of lamb at the local store, the other customers gasp with horror) Miss Jackson tantalizingly builds up a picture of a household besieged by anger from without and fear from within. Creating a cross-rough of curiosity-backward in time to whatever dreadful event has brought the Black-woods to their present predicament, forward to some nameless but newly foreshadowed disaster in the future-the book manages the ironic miracle of convincing the reader that a house inhabited by a lunatic, a poisoner and a pyromaniac is a world more...
...inmates has a chance to free herself and, in a skillful variation on the close of Henry James's Washington Square, refuses to answer the beckoning call of normality, her final turning back to the house somehow seems wise and fitting. "I sat very quietly," Merricat reflects, describing not only a conversation she had with Constance but the kind of communion that exists between them, ";listening to what she had almost said." What Miss Jackson's characters really do and say, however, offers enough diversion even without reading between or behind their lines: Merricat: I wonder...
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