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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.