[citation needed] In the years leading up to the publishing of We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson's health was on a steady decline.
[4] In 2010, Adam Bock and Todd Almond staged a musical adaptation of Jackson's novel at the Yale Repertory Theatre in New Haven, Connecticut, with Alexandra Socha in the role of Merricat.
I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the deathcup mushroom... Everyone else in my family is dead.Marisa Silver sees Merricat's opening monologue as "brazen, creepy, obviously unreliable and utterly disarming.
"[9] Merricat describes herself as 18 during the events of the novel but her actions represent a child of much younger age, "smashing things when she's upset and getting lost in her reveries of living on the moon.
Angela Slatter quotes the film The Usual Suspects to describe Merricat: "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist."
Merricat allures readers by making "us love this strange, broken girl" but, upon revealing her true nature with the climax of the novel, she "breaks our hearts".
"[14] Joyce Carol Oates, who has written of Merricat as a character on many occasions,[15][16] has said "Of all the precocious children and adolescents of mid-twentieth-century American fiction—a dazzling lot that includes the tomboys Frankie of Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding (1946) and Scout Finch of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), the murderous eight-year-old Rhoda Penmark of William March's The Bad Seed (1954), and the slightly older, disaffected Holden Caulfield of J.D.
Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Esther Greenwood of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar (1963)—none is more memorable than eighteen-year-old 'Merricat' of Shirley Jackson's masterpiece of Gothic suspense We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962)... Merricat speaks with a seductive and disturbing authority, never drawn to justifying her actions but recounting them.