We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a horror novel about identifying with a murderer and I think most readers finish it without noticing
I've recommended this book probably a dozen times and the reaction is almost always the same, people just come back saying they loved Merricat and found her charming and relatable and I never know whether to say anything because that reaction is exactly what Jackson engineered and also kind of the whole point.
Merricat poisoned her entire family and she did it deliberately, she selected the method, she put it in the sugar and she has no remorse about any of it and the book makes this completely clear if you're reading it rather than just vibing with the prose voice and what Jackson does that's so hard to explain without sounding like you're ruining the book is that she gives Merricat a narrative voice so specific and so internaly consistent that you naturalise her logic within about twenty pages. By the time you understand what she did you're already inside her head and leaving feels uncomfortable and that's not an accident. The coziness of the house, the rituals, the relationship with Constance, the way the village is framed as hostile and threatening all of it is Merricat's worldview and Jackson never once steps outside it to correct you.
I reread the first fifty pages two days ago specifically looking for the seams and they're not there. Jackson doesn't slip. You are inside a specific consciousness the entire time and that consciousness committed a massacre and found it reasonable and the horror of the book is that by the end you've been living in that head long enough that her reasoning has started to feel almost coherentc and the people who find it cozy aren't wrong exactly. Jackson made it cozy on purpose. That's the trick.