Reviews for Domnei

The average rating for Domnei based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-11-02 00:00:00 James Basile Bizarre, strange, haunting, sinister, disturbing, twisted, foreboding, suffocatingly claustrophobic, leaving you with the ever-growing sense of unease. What else can I say about this book to give it justice? This is a chillingly terrifying story that has nothing to do with the things that go BUMP in the night. No, it's the odd terror that comes when things go BUMP in the mind. And the most terrifying things are those that are left unsaid, that creep up at you from behind the printed lines, just hinted at and left for your own brain to chillingly realize. "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead." Behind the events of the story is the mystery of the Blackwood family, rich New England landowners who are quite well-aware of their presumed class-snobbish superiority over the inhabitants of the nearby village; the family which is in turn met with distrust, fear and even hatred - not quite unfounded, actually. You see, six years ago half of the members of the Blackwood family were poisoned by arsenic in their food. Three are left: Uncle Julian, left crippled by the poison, hanging on to the remnants of his mind, obsessed with the tragedy of the day of the murder; Constance, an agoraphobiac trapped in the narrow confines of her domestic universe, cooking for the remnants of her family with a strained chirpy attitude - a young woman who was also the cook on the day of the fateful arsenic poisoning and therefore is considered the poisoner in the eyes of the villagers; and Mary Katherine, Merricat, the narrator of the story, now eighteen, who was sent to her room without dinner on the day of the poisoning, who now serves as a link between her diminished and scorned family and the rest of the world. For a careful reader, the identity of the poisoner is really very easy to figure out after the first few pages. The psychological impact is never about the identity, it's about the implications of it. And that's what gives it a real punch. "I am going to put death in all their food and watch them die." This strange little family survives without ever deviating from their strict routines, remaining shut off from the outside world until one day an unexpected arrival threatens the fragile stability - of the family and of Merricat's mind. And the events that follow lead to the scariest and saddest ending presented in the most chillingly subtle way possible. "I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs.Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true." Our narrator, Merricat Blackwood, is not a character you can easily forget. She is written with such skill, with such vividness, with such persuasion that the pages come alive with her bizarre voice of a seemingly adult woman forever trapped in neverending childhood, in the world of twisted magical reality of strange rituals and special objects and strict routine that can never be changed, or else. "On Sunday morning the change was one day nearer. I was resolute about not thinking my three magic words and would not let them into my mind, but the air of change was so strong that there was no avoiding it; change lay over the stairs and the kitchen and the garden like fog. I would not forget my magic words; they were MELODY GLOUCESTER PEGASUS, but I refused to let them into my mind." And the scariest thing of all to me was how more and more enthralling Merricat's voice became with every page, with every minute spent inside her head, until it's hard not to take her side despite all the implications that it carries, despite reason suggesting otherwise, despite knowledge of what's going on. And that's when you realize the magnetic pull Merricat has, holding her little world together in the ways that suit her - little world it may be, but it's wholly her own, steadily holding against anything that can be perceived as a disturbance, an interference, a threat. And the words of her little game in the summerhouse take on a new resonance. "Bow your heads to our beloved Mary Katherine…or you will be dead." I found this book deeply disturbing in its deceiving simplicity, and scarily engrossing - the book written by an oddball ostracized agoraphobiac obsessed with food and trapped in her own little universe by the last years of her life. Shirley Jackson's Constance and Merricat, securely huddled in their own little corner of the world, not accepted but feared and left alone, the heart of legends and superstitions - was it in a way a cry for help or an unattainable dream? I don't know, and I think I sleep better precisely because I don't know. Unflinching 5 stars and a shudder at the seemingly so innocent of an ending:"Oh Constance, we are so happy."

Review # 2 was written on 2016-07-09 00:00:00 E N Marshall This book is a masterpiece. It is short and spare and written in crystal clear prose, yet so evocative that it is richer in nuance than most good novels twice its size. It is so good I could kick myself for not reading it years ago, yet so mythic I am convinced I have known it always, like a tragic folktale or a chilling childhood dream. And yet, for all its grimness, it is essentially a comedy: darkly, transcendently, funny. The Blackwood sisters'28-year-old Constance and 18-year-old Mary Katharine'live in a big old house on the outskirts of town. They are fitfully persecuted by the locals, who are convinced one of them is a murderer: their whole family'with the exception of scatterbrained Uncle Julian'was poisoned with arsenic six years ago. Now the three survivors'along with their black cat Jonas'are living together in deliberate tranquility, when long-lost cousin Charles arrives on their doorstep, barely concealing his interest in the lovely Constance and the Blackwood family estate. The narrative voice of Merrycat'nickname for Mary Katherine'is perhaps the most distinctive thing about the novel. Deceptively childlike, obsessed with omens, magic words, and lucky days, Merrycat is nevertheless a clear and sharp-eyed observer of the day-to-day events of her world. Her naive shrewdness speaks to us like Huckleberry Finn's, her quirkiness charms us like Holden Caulfield's, yet she possesses a distance, a reserve, that is all her own. Those of you who read novels like autobiographies will find tantalizing tidbits here. The local village resembles Jackson's North Bennington, Vermont, a place Jackson always felt treated her family as outsiders (college eggheads, Democrats, atheists, Jews) and provided her the inspiration for her notorious early success, "The Lottery." The two sisters were inspired by Jackson's two daughters, the placid and cautious Constance by Joanne and the superstitious and daring Merrycat by Sarah. But of course Jackson drew on herself for inspiration too, particularly from her fascination with witchcraft and sympathetic magic and her persistent, crippling agoraphobia. And Cousin Charles resembles her husband, in his critical comments about the housekeeping and his continual concerns about money. (Although husband Stanley was a literary critic, his wife Shirley was the literary cash cow of the family, and he once calculated precisely how much money was lost whenever his wife wasted her valuable time composing a letter to a friend.) Perhaps what I like best about the book'besides the dark humor, and the voice of Merrycat of course'is its sweet and sad conclusion. After the destruction has passed and gone'a climax which reveals the full impact of the novel's title'we witness a family rebuild an old life out of love, and even glimpse a little human compassion for a change. It is the twilight happiness of Shakespeare's Winter's Tale and The Tempest, the kind of happiness Lear and Cordelia might have enjoyed, if they had lived. Here is the novel's famous first paragraph, which gives you a good idea of Merrycat's distinctive voice: My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death cap mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.