Sugar With Your Tea? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Merricat

The story is narrated by 18-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood, or Merricat as she's generally called. From the very first sentence of the book, she introduces herself in a calm, measured tone: "My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance."

Though the character comes across as childlike and whimsical at times, Merricat is a complex and deeply disturbed narrator. She's an unreliable narrator, but not a deceptive one, although perhaps she reveals more than she thinks. She filters her narration through a lens shaped by delusion, magical thinking, and trauma. She's fiercely protective of the isolated life she shares with Constance and of Constance herself.

Answer: Corpses

More specifically, she imagines she's walking on the corpses of the villagers, a pretty intense visual that gives us a look into her dark mind. Merricat feels alienated and threatened by the people in the nearby village. When she makes her weekly trip into town for groceries, she's met with open hostility, mocked, scorned, stared at, and whispered about.

The remaining Blackwood family has become the target of local suspicion and resentment ever since the murders six years ago. This tension between the isolated family and the hostility of the outside world is one of the central points that drive the plot.

Answer: Arsenic

Arsenic was mixed into the sugar that most members of the Blackwood family used on their dessert, a dish of blackberries. Only two family members survived the meal unharmed: Constance, who never took sugar on her blackberries, and Merricat, who had been sent to her room without supper.

The event left the surviving Blackwoods in chaos, both emotionally and socially. The townspeople blamed Constance, despite the lack of solid evidence, and the family's reputation was permanently scarred. The murders cast a shadow over all the events of the story.

Answer: Julian

The only other member of the household is Julian, uncle to the sisters. He survived the poisoning six years earlier but not without lasting effects. He received a small dose of arsenic, enough to leave him frail, mentally misty, and confined to a wheelchair.

Uncle Julian is obsessed with the day of the murders. He constantly revisits it, asking repetitive questions and compiling detailed notes ("my papers") for a "book" he claims he's writing about the incident. Though often confused and rambling, he adds a complicated mix of dark humor and tragedy to the story. His presence also highlights the family's isolation, demonstrating how the Blackwoods remain suspended in that moment of the dinner six years ago. It's always there.

Answer: Charles

The arrival of Cousin Charles shakes the delicate balance at the Blackwood house. Merricat seems to sense a shift coming before he even appears, her rituals and superstitions becoming more intense and frantic. When Charles does arrive, his interest in the family's money and in Constance quickly makes him a threat as far as Merricat is concerned. Merricat seems to see him not just as an interloper, but as a danger to the safe, isolated world she's built with Constance.

Her resistance to him grows increasingly desperate and hostile, and eventually sparks the climactic events at the end of the story.

Answer: She's dead

Uncle Julian, whose mental functioning has been affected by the arsenic poisoning, is a confused gentleman, often rambling or forgetting key details. In one of his more unsettling moments of the book, he casually refers to Merricat as having died in the orphanage six years ago. Up to this point in the story, he and Merricat have had no direct interaction, a subtle but chilling detail that personally had me climbing the walls with curiosity.

His mistaken belief opens the door to an interesting set of questions indeed: Does he see Merricat? Does he believe she's a ghost or hallucination? Is she an unacknowledged presence in the house? Or does his confusion hint at something more disturbing lurking beneath the surface? Like many things in the book, the answer is less important than the unsettling feeling the questions bring.

Answer: A smoldering pipe

The fire is unintentionally started by Merricat, who, in a moment of anger or frustration, tosses Charles's still-smoking pipe into a wastebasket filled with newspaper. While she and Constance are downstairs, the embers catch, and the fire begins. Though not started with malicious intent, Merricat's act is not exactly innocent either, and it sparks (see what I did there?) the total collapse of the Blackwood household's fragile order.

The fire becomes a turning point in the story, escalating the tension with the villagers to the breaking point and setting the stage for the surreal aftermath.

Answer: Jim Donell

Once the fire is extinguished and the house lies smoking and exposed, the tension that has simmered for years between the villagers and the Blackwood family finally snaps. It's Jim Donell, fire chief, loudmouth, and one of the more vocally hostile townspeople, who hurls the first stone through a drawing room window. That single rock is all it takes to break the social order outside the house, and the villagers quickly fall into full-blown destruction mode.

They loot, destroy, and desecrate the Blackwood home with a mob mentality that's as surreal as it is sudden.

This moment marks the point where the villagers' casual cruelty becomes outright violence, and the sisters' isolation becomes permanent.

Answer: Julian

In the chaos that erupts after the fire and the villagers' rampage, Uncle Julian, already in poor health, dies off-page. His exact cause of death isn't spelled out in detail, but it seems to be from stress and shock from the violent intrusion and destruction of the home leading to a heart attack. Jim Clarke finds his body, and it's a moment of quiet sorrow ending the frenzy as suddenly as it began.

His death marks the end of the last family member (besides the sisters) who remembered the world before the poisoning, and after this, the Blackwood household becomes even more closed off from the outside. Merricat's narration shifts subtly as she begins to fully retreat into the fantasy world she has always preferred.

Answer: Merricat

Although it's certainly no secret, Merricat eventually confirms our suspicions that she was the one who poisoned the sugar with arsenic, leading to the deaths of her parents, her aunt, and her brother six ago when she was twelve. She discusses this briefly with Constance in a moment of calm after the chaos with the villagers. Constance has known all along.

The confession is less of a twist and more of a chilling window into Merricat's damaged mind. It also solidifies her role as a deeply unreliable, if strangely sympathetic, narrator.