"We Have Always Lived in the Castle" [.]

[fiefoe]

As with all Gothic novels, the horror gradually built  towards a crescendo. (Un)fortunately at the same time this reader had to fight a losing battle with Morpheus, so the horror was kept at bay.

Us/them:

• So our house was built up with layers of Blackwood property weighting it, and keeping it steady against the world.
• In this village the men stayed young and did the gossiping and the women aged with grey evil weariness and stood silently waiting for the men to get up and come home.
• Perhaps the fine houses had been captured - perhaps as punishment for the Rochesters and the Blackwoods and their secret bad hearts? - and were held prisoner in the village; perhaps their slow rot was a sign of the ugliness of the villagers.
• Some of the people in the village had real faces that I knew and could hate individually ;
• All the Blackwood women had taken the food that came from the ground and preserved it, and the deeply colored rows of jellies and pickles and bottled vegetables and fruit, maroon and amber and dark rich green stood side by side in our cellar and would stand there forever, a poem by the Blackwood women.

<Spoilers!>:

• We did not accept mail, and we did not have a telephone; both had become unbearable six years before.
• Even the garden had become a strange landscape with Charles' figure in it; I could see him standing under the apple trees and the trees were crooked and shortened beside him.
• ... perhaps the fire might be persuaded to reverse itself and abandon our house and destroy the village instead;
• We moved together very slowly toward the house, trying to understand its ugliness and ruin and shame.
• "I believe the one you are wearing now was used for summer breakfasts on the lawn many years ago." <> "Some day I shall be a summer breakfast on the lawn, and some days I shall be a formal dinner by candlelight.."
• "We are the biggest church supper they ever had," Constance said once,

__ the wave of talk began and they were swept back into their own lives.
__ little runs of laughter

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