THE LOTTERY AND OTHER STORIES; THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE; WE HAVE ALWAYS LIVED IN THE CASTLE

Besides The Lottery, which remains excellent as ever, there are 2-3 stories in here that are more or less worth reading. As for the rest, my best guess is that they're SUPPOSED to be thought provokingly open ended, but it's done so poorly that it reads like she just randomly decided when to stop writing. After how good most of her novels were, it was really disappointing. I have to note though that this did come out right around the time she wrote her first novel, which is just as bad as these stories, so I hope maybe her later stories improve as much as her later novels do.

I remember reading Shirley Jackson's story The Lottery in school. I was a book of her stories which includes The Lottery. Unfortunately, I didn't care for too many of the stories in the book. Every story I read was depressing and the characters were hopeless, helpless, and after reading a few, I had my fill. I did enjoy reading The Lottery again, but that was the only story I enjoyed.

26 short - and often disturbing- stories. Shirley Jackson lures you into a rose coloured Walt Disney /Bells of St Mary all American world, then with the slightest poke she reveals the petty hatreds , bigotries , prejudices and lust for cruelty; made all the more shocking as you can recognise them-sometimes in yourself.
These "Hits" are often brutal. A young boy on a train with his mother and baby sister. A man chats to the boy telling him he cut his sister into pieces, and he's "Just joking" but the effect on the boy is untold by Jackson. She leaves you in the nightmare. Then there's the well intentioned-initially-Mrs Wilson towards Boyd, her sons young black friend, where her deep rooted racism surfaces when the boy tells her his family are doing well and don't need the worn clothes she is offering. There is the constant out casting of people who are "different"; don't share the bigotries of the mob society or the class etiquettes. Then at the end you have "The Lottery"...
Shirley Jackson's themes and style of portraying them are unique. No one else can write stories like these in this way. Main Street was never so dark and disturbing.

5546. The Lottery and Other Stories, by Shirley Jackson (read 25 Mar 2018) When I read the biography of Shirley Jackson by Ruth Franklin I decided I should read The :Lottery again--I read it years ago--since it was such an important factor in the author's life. This book has 24 other short stories included so I read them all, even though I do not like to read lots of short stories in a book since one keeps starting over so many times in the course of reading the book. This book has The Lottery as the last story in the book. I found the stories of uneven merit. Probably the best ones I guess were "The Daemon Lover" , "Trial by Combat", and "Charles", but of course the most sensational story is "The Lottery". I had sort of thought it was laid in colonial times,like the witch trials, but the story talks of tractors and is laid in present time--which makes it highly unlikely,of course. The matter-of-factness of the town people is striking and chilling. It is less than 12 pages long and if you have not read it, you should as it is a good illustration of Shirley Jackson and her unusual mind and ability..

This is a book jam-packed with misanthropes. And yet, I believe the underlying thesis is that most of society is populated with misanthropes and monsters.

This collection is broken into five sections, seemingly thematically. The first section seems to be largely introspective on identity and gender roles. Some feel rather thin on story, but frequently deliver a sense of discomfort. “Like Mother Used to Make” is probably the most representative of this section, as it includes an inversion of traditional gender roles followed by a slow displacement of our protagonist from their relationships and their home. If this is through the lens of unreliable narration, this could lend itself to even more interpretation.

The second section seems to deal with deals with prejudices and bigotry. “The Witch” is a delightfully misanthropic story where a stranger punishes a mother for having an uncontrolled and generally terrible child by encouraging him to greater depths of savagery. “The Renegade” is the strongest story in this collection after “The Lottery”. The social manipulation rife throughout this collection is needle point precision in the ostracism of outsiders and the destruction of the spirit of those deemed weakest in the pack. “After You, My Dear Alphonse” effectively sticks with pins, mounts, and frames the soft bigotry of low expectations while leaving the protagonist blithely unaware.

The third section seems to be firmly rooted in showing how terrible humans are to each other, frequently through oppressive politeness. “Colloquy” documents one woman’s unraveling with her doctor prescribing platitudes. “The Dummy” not only shows a ventriloquist living through his dummy, but an outsider being so upset by the behavior that they lash out. Yet they curiously lash out at the dummy rather than the ventriloquist.

The fourth section seems to be where despair wins. “The Lottery” remains an incredible masterpiece where the pieces slowly come together into the horrific crescendo asking us to question blind adherence to tradition. The next most fascinating piece from this section was “The Tooth” which follows a surreal journey of a woman in a broken physical and mental state to have an extraction. Part of me wonders whether this was an oblique story about abortion rather than about dental work. It seemed an absurd amount of effort for dental work, and the destruction of self and sanity would seem better suited for a different kind of extraction.

The fifth section is a grim epilogue. This collection merits further consideration and a spot on the future schedule for a re-read.

After finishing We Have Always Lived in the Castle--and being in the mood for short stories and having already owned this book--I jumped in excitedly. I finally got around to reading one of the most famous short stories ever . . . and it both hit hard and fell flat at the same time. I would have loved to go into reading it with no prior knowledge, but I knew something at the end was coming, something bad . . . and it really took away from the amount of shock I may have felt had I not known to expect something sinister (which it was, yes indeed). I still think it's a good story, but I will never experience reading it brand-new.

A lot of these stories just aren't my type of thing, and I have no problem admitting that if there was something I was supposed to "catch" in these stories, I missed it most of the time. Maybe it's because they're dated, maybe it's because I find short stories that are too short to be a waste usually, but I felt that a good number of these stories were instantly forgettable. Stories like The Dummy, My life with R.H. Macy, A Fine Old Firm: what was the point of reading them?

That being said, there were a few standouts.
Daemon Lover is the best story in the book, one where the ending was not lost on me.
Trial by Combat is a fun--and funny--little story
Flower Garden was a serious story that I'm certain was more relevant so many years ago. Like the other longer pieces in this book, the story was good.
Men With Their Big Shoes and The Renegade round off the stories I really enjoyed, though the latter made me a bit furious, being a dog lover.

Honestly, by the time I read the last couple stories I was burned out on this book. A few stories are really very good, but with twenty-five in total they are too far and few between, Too many stories that are 3-6 pages long and don't really give anything to the reader.

The world Shirley Jackson creates in her collection of short stories is a strange and haunting one. While her stories seem mundane on one level, there's something unsettling, just out of sight. The concerns and issues Jackson tackles are contemporary to the time she wrote them, the 1940s, but they are also relevant to us today. Race, gender, identity, assumptions we make about people, right and wrong, the question of whether to keep or break with tradition. These issues are all explored in sometimes comical, sometimes unusual, and sometimes frightening fashion.

Jackson's masterpiece, "The Lottery," portrays a cruel tradition that has gone on far too long. Though many members of the town seem unhappy with it, it still persists under irrational arguments. One man argues that if the Lottery is stopped, then what's to stop men from working, though this has absolutely nothing to do with the Lottery's purpose. Sadly, this kind of argumentation persists in all wakes of society, and this story is relevant to all times. I'm sure everyone has parents or knows people who continue on with a tradition only because their parents before them did it. When kids complain, they are merely shushed and their reasons aren't heard. Though these traditions aren't as harsh as the one in "The Lottery," Jackson effectively shows the dangers of doing something simply because it's been done for generations.

Not all of the stories in this collection are great, though most are. Some are puzzling, sometimes in good ways, but sometimes not. The nice thing about it is the variety. Jackson experiments with style now and then. "My Life with R.H. Macy" has a sci-fi feel to it, in its critique of corporations and their treatment of employees. "The Tooth" has a sort of gothic, psychedelic feel to it in its critique of the treatment of patients by doctors. Anyone interested in women's lit should give Shirley Jackson a read, if you haven't already. Those interested in a look at 1940s American life, from an interesting perspective, should also give her a read. At the very least, seek out these three stories and read them: "The Lottery," "After You, My Dear Alphonse," and "Charles." They represent some of her best work, and they are some of the best short fiction in American literature.

The Lottery is one of 25 contemporary American short stories from the 1940's printed in this volume. When first published in The New Yorker, the story surprised both the author and the magazine's staff by causing shock and outrage. Subscriptions were cancelled, apologies demanded, and even Shirley Jackson's parents expressed the wish that she would write something more wholesome. The shock arose from a barbaric ancient practice being given a modern setting. With time, the outrage subsided, but throughout the rest of her life Shirley Jackson continued to receive requests for an explanation of what the story was about. It is to be hoped that she also received many letters of appreciation of the way in which she builds the story. Of the 3,377 words, none are spare, none lacking, and scarcely any are out of place; and it seems unlikely that many readers over the years will have done other than devour them all at a single sitting.

Of the rest of the collection, some stories are more memorable than others. `My Life with R H Macy', `Flower Garden' and `Dorothy and my Grandmother and the Sailors' are among my favourites, but all are worth reading - even studying, by those concerned with style and the construction of short stories. All are set in 1940's America, mostly but not entirely New York or New England and, as with The Lottery, the denouement almost invariably comes as at least something of a surprise.

Shirley Jackson's daemon lover, the blue-suited James Harris, stalks this collection, appearing in over half the stories to usher the action along or cause a little mischief. His presence (ubiquitous enough that Jackson initially wanted the subtitle of this work to read The Adventures of James Harris) shouldn't fool a reader into expecting these tales to skew heavily toward a Haunting of Hill House supernaturality or "The Lottery"'s macabre. Most evils in these stories are petty ones, performed by demons with human faces in the course of their regular-day lives: the shunning of a woman a little too nice to the colored help in a small Southern town, the callousness of children in the face of the imminent death of a pet, the meanness of a rich old man who doesn't read buying a book out from beneath the boy who would truly cherish it. All are beautifully crafted and finely honed fictions, but none sport the creepy stonings or ghostly knockings one might expect from a writer of Jackson's reputation, and only two or three have any whiff of the truly weird about them. A marvelous treat that can only be ruined by a reader's mistaken expectations of what they're getting into.

In Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, though the stoning reminds us of the Old Testament punishment, its original intent has long been forgotten. We view with horror at the barbarity and insanity of the custom, just as we consider the Romans barbaric for entertaining themselves with gladiators. But perhaps a visitor to the U.S. without previous exposure may find American football, shoulders banging into heads and players piling on top of each other, also “barbaric and insane.”

We do not question our customs and habits just as the villagers in the story do not theirs. What we view as “normal living” may be considered insanity to foreigners, and vice versa.

We sit in the traffics for hours, stare at the TV or computer or tablet until bedtime, and text 24/7 to feel connected with some body. Just because everyone else is doing it? Just because our parents or grandparents have been doing it for years? Just because TV ads tell us it’s the good life? Or because it’s the path of least resistance?

Through Jackson’s story, the reader reflects on his or her customs and habits, most of which are detrimental only when gone through without understanding their purposes. We may realize how silly some of our routines are. And also others’ habits and customs may no longer be as “strange.”

Jackson was widely known as the author of The Lottery, a short story which was first published in 1948 in the New Yorker magazine, creating much controversy at the time. It provoked an unprecedented response from the public; a record number of letters arrived at the publisher's offices, most of them demanding to know what the story meant. I admit I read The Lottery first, although it is the final story in this collection. It is certainly dark and sinister. It describes with growing suspense a small-town lottery; but to decide exactly what? Perhaps its indictment of small-town America is not so shocking now, but it must surely have been challenging at the time. It's not the story that sticks in my mind the most from this collection, however, perhaps because it is just a little too conventional. Nonetheless it's perfectly-formed, and it is, quite rightly, one of the best-known short stories ever written.

The story I enjoyed the most was The Tooth, which breaks my rule that it's necessary for a good short story to have a good title! Overcoming my distaste, I was stunned by this ambiguous gem. Jackson is adept at creating atmosphere, and the sense of impending doom this tale creates is almost suffocating. Clara Spencer has a sore tooth; and she takes herself off to the big city to see a dentist. As far as the plot goes, that's about it; but, as in all the most haunting tales, the beauty is in the journey.

My Life With R. H. Macy is a stream-of-consciousness look at the dehumanising effects of mundane employment, and is chillingly hilarious. In The Daemon Lover, a woman waits for, then searches for, the man she is to marry that day, only to find that he has disappeared as completely as if he had never existed; and she finds it possible to forgive, but not to forget. In Trial by Combat, a shy woman confronts her kleptomaniac neighbour, and in Pillar of Salt, a tourist in New York is gradually paralysed by the threatening city. These are disturbing, unforgettable tales with satisfyingly ambiguous endings.

Jackson had two writing styles. She wrote with detail and humour about domesticity, lending a significance to everyday chores; and yet she could move swiftly to cold-blooded and dispassionate psychological horror without apparent effort. Her taut and spare prose builds a story's mood quickly and efficiently, ideal for short stories where the reader needs to be engaged from the first line. She must have been a pioneer of the unresolved ending; and, in fact, my only caveat about this collection is that one or two of the stories have endings which seem to be truncated rather than unresolved.

These tales are beautifully written, and I enjoyed reading them all. They are eerie, unforgettable, by turns terrifying and hilarious, creating a bright, sharp world where the strange lurks in the darkness just around the corner, and where nothing is quite as it seems. The Lottery and Other Stories was the only collection to be published during the author's lifetime.

Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) was a professional short story writer in an era when the term meant an author who was able to subordinate their own inclinations to the demands of the magazines in which they were published. As such, she well-paid to write stories tailored to such magazines as VOGUE, MADEMOISELLE, WOMAN'S DAY, GOOD HOUSEKEEPING, and THE SATURDAY EVENING POST. Although much admired at the time, these stories are considered trivial today--largely because, whenever the opportunity arose for her to work without restriction, Jackson produced material that was infinitely more powerful, material that shocked, disquieted, upset, disturbed, and horrified readers who came to it in an unsuspecting frame of mind.

Inasmuch as most of the reading public presently knows her from the short story "The Lottery" and the novel THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE, Jackson is frequently thought of as horror writer. There is truth to this, but this is not the literally monstrous horror of such writers as Stephen King or Dean Koontz; it is instead the horror of the ordinary and the everyday. It is a nice old gentleman on a train chatting with a small child; it is the dog that chases the neighbor's chickens; it is a woman on vacation in the city. It is nothing more nor less than the horror of strangulation by the absolutely ordinary.

Much of Jackson's fiction rests on the social boundaries that constricted women of the 1940s and 1950s, when a woman's preferred career was thought to be marriage and motherhood--a notion that Jackson undercuts time after time in truly poisonous portraits of jilted lovers, exhausted housewives, and duped mothers whose situations are made unexpectedly and terrifyingly clear to them in a sudden flash of self-realization. Even the luxury of a housekeeper to a pregnant wife is frought with danger, as the young Mrs. Hart so painfully discovers when confronted with the invisible hooks of cleaning woman Mrs. Anderson in "Men With Their Big Shoes." But if women's issues are the vehicle by which Jackson most often delivers her message, the message itself is one of hell on earth.

Jackson's tales are often ironic, often satirical, and frequently funny, but even so there is no escaping the silenced scream that issues from those who unexpectedly find themselves among the damned--a situation all the more unexpected because most of the time they have done everything they were supposed to do and done it well according to the standards of the world around them. In "The Lottery" Tess was late to the drawing because she didn't want to leave her dishes in the sink. The kindly mother in "Charles" takes pride in the fact that her son is so well-behaved in comparison with the kindergarten class troublemaker. Mrs. Wilson wants to show that she is not racist when her son brings home a black playmate in "After You, My Dear Alphonse;" in the process she unwittingly displays exactly how racist she really is.

The occasional men to whom Jackson turns her attention fare no better: a slightly drunken party-goer finds himself vulnerable to the apocalyptic imagination of a teenage girl doing her homework in the kitchen in "The Intoxicated," and David Turner, who prepares a good meal for next-door-neighbor Marcia in "Like Mother Used To Make," finds himself thoroughly emasculated for his pains. But more often as not, men--sometimes with considerable deliberation--are the slippery slope from which wives, lovers, daughters, and mothers slide into personal chaos and disaster, with the mysterious Jamie Harris of "The Daemon Lover" a case in point.

Jackson's world seethes with violence and the threat of violence, often arising from seemingly innocent circumstances, frequently involving a sense of territorialism and personal possession, and often with children at the center. "The Witch" finds a child much more prepared to perceive, define, and defend himself against psychological danger than his mother; "The Renegade" finds children thoroughly prepared to take bad-taste jokes and sarcasm to a logical and violent conclusion that will anger and horrify anyone who has ever loved an animal. But Jackson's violence is not always literal; it is often emotional, covert, and symbolic, examining the way in which we ceaselessly poison each other, sometimes accidentally, sometimes deliberately--and Jackson is not afraid to imply racism, sexism, homophobia, social class, and the closed doors of the status quo as underlying cause.

Critics are fond of saying that Jackson couldn't have written a bad sentence if she had tried, and it is true that she has a unique, often lyrical, tone of voice. It plays beautifully against the shock of her stories and the questions they leave, often unanswered, to resonate in your mind when the story is done. Although her output was somewhat uneven, she is Truly one of the great masters of the short-story form and truly one of the great American authors of the 20th Century.

GFT, the store Reviewer

Shirley Jackson is well, complex...different, a woman writer well ahead of her time. Her world is anything but simple, but her prose *is* and I mean that in all the best. While the day can be "sunny and bright," we know there there is an underlying unease with the story she is delving into, tearing at its parts, and extracting the most inimaginable.

Of this short story collection, I may have found myself more intune with some of the lesser-known stories, THE INTOXICATED, THE DAEMON LOVER, AFTER YOU MY DEAR ALPHONSE, and COLLOQUEY...even THE LOTTERY, for which this one is named wasn't my all-time favorite.

Still, I have a thing for THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE and none of her other works (that I've read, anyway) have yet to live up.

I never read the short story "the Lottery" in school or anything, but had it recommended to me by my mum after she heard I loved Ira Levin's "the Stepford Wives". I didn't know it was a short story, so when I got the book and saw it was the last story included, I decided to leave it till the end and read the stories front-to-back.
I really enjoy Margaret Atwood, and find similarities in the writing style of her and Shirley Jackson; perhaps it's the feminine perspective, the insight, the banal everyday detail laid out with great care. I found myself really enjoying the book, and always of course anticipating the final story.
Highlights for me in this book include "Charles", about the 'troubled classmate' of a woman's young son; "the Renegade", in which a woman feels compassion for her dog's ignorant activities; "Dorothy and My Grandmother and the Sailors", which reminded me of my paranoia of the unknown as a child and my then-absolute belief in my family's viewpoints; "Of Course" made me squirm with awkwardness at the "thin-ice" of introductions and laugh out loud; and of course, "the Lottery" was a great way for this book to end for me. I kind of anticipated what was going to happen, but it was no less effective when it did.
The feeling of helplessness is present in many of these stories, of a woman watching her life through confused eyes and feeling a loss of control, not being able to relate to or understand the people around her. The stories and characters were very real, the conversation between characters very natural. Every awkward moment, every suspicious action, is captured beautifully. I really liked this book. I would recommend it highly; I am not usually a fan of short stories, but these were wonderful. I found myself looking forward to sitting down to read one here and there, and all of them left me thinking about them afterwards.
**Interesting note: as I was reading the short story of "the Lottery", I found myself reminded of a music video by Marilyn Manson, for the song "Man That You Fear". Looking this connection up on the internet, I found that he used the story as his inspiration for the video. Even if you can't stomach Marilyn Manson, it's an interesting (and inoffensive!) visualization (though somewhat altered) of the story, and worth checking out for interest's sake. Just thought I'd mention it!

Please note: the one-star rating is for the Kindle formatting, not the book's content. The publisher did a terrible job proofreading this; it is filled with typos and the links in the table of contents go to the wrong chapters. If publishers are going to charge comparable prices for e-books as they do for the printed books, then they need to stop putting out such crap editing jobs. No publisher would dream of releasing a printed book with so many mistakes, but for some reason they think it's okay for Kindle editions.

What a great selection of stories, none of them "horror" per se (Jackson is best know for writing "The Haunting of Hill House") but arguably, each story has at least one character behaving in terrible, "monstous" ways. Yes, most of the stories do not have tidy endings, leaving it up to the reader to decide what has or will happen. Except for the discriptions of clothing and the frequent mention of cigarette smoking, these stories are not at all dated. Highly recommended !

This collection is exemplary of Jackson's short fiction: from melancholy tones and psychology horror, to explorations of familial relations and domesticity, often of a wry nature.

The title story, The Lottery, is undoubtedly Jackson's most well-known and infamous short story. Essential reading for lover's of dark fiction, The Lottery is a provocative tale of age-old traditions, blind acquiescence, and mob mentality.

Recommended.

Despite writing a handful of excellent gothic horror novels, including The Haunting of Hill House (just made into a film for the second time), Shirley Jackson seems destined to be best remembered for her great short story The Lottery. Originally published in The New Yorker in 1948, and a a staple of High School English classes ever since, it elicited some of the most spirited response in the history of that dowdy weekly. The story is a stunning indictment of something but is sufficiently ambiguous that many different individuals and groups were able to take personal offense at its implications.
It would seem to me though, that there is a pretty conventional way of reading it; one that both touches upon a basic human truth and offers fairly little offense to anyone. Take it at relative face value and the Lottery represents any human institution which is allowed to continue unchallenged and unconsidered until it becomes a destructive, rather than a constructive, force in men's lives.. After all, in the story, the reasons for holding the Lottery are long forgotten, other than the platitudinous "Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon". And the rituals connected to it, other than the making of participant lists, the use of the old ballot box and the swearing in, have mostly fallen by the wayside. All that really remains is a rigid adherence to a hoary tradition.
Now folks can, of course, freight it with specific signifigances--read the whole thing as an attack on capitalism or religion or small town conformity or agrarian culture or any of a number of different things. But it seems to me that the most straightforward reading allows it to impact on all of those things. Simply put, the fact that something has been done a certain way for a really long time does not necessarily justify its continuance.
If this powerfully disturbing story seems like too heavy a cudgel to wield to make such a self evident, unnuanced point, let's not underestimate how difficult it is to teach people anything. After all, Plato has maintained the title of world's greatest philosopher for a few thousand years now on the basis of "Know thyself". So, why shouldn't Shirley grab a spot in the limelight for herself with a story that admonishes us to examine our civic rituals, especially since she couched her admonition in a great American gothic horror tale, which still retains its visceral power to shock us.
GRADE: A

When Shirley Jackson's story "The Lottery" was first published in the New Yorker in 1948 - post-war readers were horrified. Hundreds of them canceled their subscriptions and dozens more wrote scathing letters of indictment to the editors.

Mild-mannered Shirley Jackson had just ripped through the veneer of Small Town, USA and exposed the maggot-laden underbelly. Here Jackson gives us a portrait of an America nobody in 1948 was willing to see - not after the ticker-tape parades celebrating the defeat of the Nazis and Japanese. We were the heroes, after all, the good guys.

Nobody wanted to look into the mirror and see the dull, narrow-minded conformity hiding in plain sight on Main Street. But such was the well-mannered terror of Jackson's story. Jackson's premise - that good, hard-working folks would murder a neighbor in a barbaric ritual -- was so horrifying that many readers simply couldn't handle it.

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle a few months after "The Lottery" was published, Jackson said: "Explaining just what I had hoped the story to say is very difficult. I suppose, I hoped, by setting a particularly brutal ancient rite in the present and in my own village to shock the story's readers with a graphic dramatization of the pointless violence and general inhumanity in their own lives."

Jackson's tale reads like a bland "day-in-the-life" story in a rather ordinary New England town. That's because Jackson lulls the reader into believing that herein lies an innocent story and not something so horribly twisted they will be cringing by the time they read the last paragraph. Notice in the first paragraph how Jackson uses long sentences to help put the reader at easy and mimic the easy rambling style of an old Yankee narrator:

"The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flower were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o'clock; in some town there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to started on June 2nd, but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o'clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner."

The story follows this pattern to the end. The reader feels like they have stepped into a small village and this lottery they are talking about is something like the square dances and church suppers that are held every Saturday night at the town hall. There's Old Man Warner complaining that the lottery "ain't what it used to be!" Dabnabit!

Everyone is so damn polite. Mr. Summers himself, running a bit late, declares, "Little late today, folks!" There's Mrs. Hutchinson so busy washing dishes that heck she completely forgot what day it was. "Thought my old man was out back stacking wood," she tells Mrs. Delacroix. "And then I looked out the window and the kids was gone, and then I remembered it was the twenty-seventh and came a-running."

She should have kept running.

There are sign posts along the way and it's enough to infuse the reader with a growing sense of unease. There's the boy, Bobby Martin, stuffing his pockets with stones and the other boys "selecting the smoothest and roundest stones." There's the dreaded black box Mr. Summers carries into the square that causes a murmur in the crowd. There's the trepidation roiling through the crowd just before the drawing (strangely, the reader thinks, the prospect of winning this lottery doesn't seem to make folks happy).

The reader's hackles begin to rise when Mr. Adams and Old Man Warner begin to talk about other villages giving up the lottery. That nonsense gets Old Man Warner ranting about young folks and breaking tradition.

"`Next thing you know, they'll be wanting to go back to living in caves, nobody work any more, live that way for a while. Used to be a saying about `Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.' First thing you know, we'd all be eating stewed chickweed and acorns. There's always been a lottery,' he added petulantly. `Bad enough to see young Joe Summers up there joking with everyone.'
`Some places have already quit lotteries,' Mr. Adams said.
`Nothing but trouble in that,' Old Man Warner said stoutly. `Pack of young fools.'"

Now the reader knows something is wrong, but not how wrong.

By the time Mr. Summers calls for everyone to be quick about it and they gather up the stones - giving Mrs. Hutchinson's toddler boy a rock to throw at his mother - and monstrously murdering her by stoning, the reader is slack jawed. You can feel the chill running down your spine - even after repeated readings.

That's the power Jackson displays here. "The Lottery" is so good, so intensely disturbing that it still has the ability to shock even today.

Enjoy literate blather? Then head over to the Dark Party Review to visit Ms. Jackson and other great writers. [..]

I bought this book as a substitute, Waldenbooks had neither of the books I went there looking for. But on a tip to "check out the literature section for something" I came across this collection. I remembered very vaguely reading "The Lottery" 4 years ago in middle school, and decided to get the book. Not because I particularly liked "The Lottery" (which I did), but I thought the book might have a couple other interesting stories. Boy, was I right. Every story has something brilliant to it. A couple of people have complained about the stories "just ending", but how else would one end them? I mean, if you put yourself in the situation, what else could you do? The stories perfect little morsels of the aberrant. So strange and so cute. I love all of them. Some say "The Lottery" is the best one in the book but I (and this may be due to my boredom with the cliché and the popular) think that the other stories are in general much better. I've copied so far 2 stories for friends, and I'm looking forward to reading more by Shirley in my Am Lit 2 class.
GET THIS BOOK. It's brilliant, it's different. I read it in 2 days.

My favourite living author of the offbeat, macabre story is Joyce Carol Oates. This prolific woman, who can seemingly pen an entire novel while having a bath, has compiled a formidable opus of stories which Alberto Manguel appropriately describes as Black Water stories. I haven't read any of her many other types of novel and short story, but if I were handing out Nobel prizes, I would grab back any of the prizes handed out in the last twenty years (they seem to be awarded on the basis of some kind of quota system) and give it to Ms Oates. But before Joyce Carol Oates there was Shirley Jackson. We've all read The Lottery in high school, and even though I was intrigued and appalled by this story at the time, I didn't seek out more Jackson for a long time, partly I think because I thought my English teacher would approve. Just as well, because I think I am better able to appreciate her now that I am older and society and life in general has become more suspect for me.

Jackson died when she was 48 years of age, a victim to depression, drink, amphetamines, and chocolate. She was married to a university professor and lived at a time when America was expanding and exporting its robust, cocksure culture to the world. All of the stories in The Lottery and Other Stories were published in the 1940s. New York City was the true capital of North America and fast becoming the capital of the world. In these stories the hypocrisy behind the blithe optimism and manifest destiny of American culture is deftly portrayed. Many conservative, nostalgic thinkers and politicians evoke this time as being a golden age, a time that our current debauched, rudderless culture should aspire to. Jackson, a literary fifth columnist, doesn't appear to have embraced any of it. She skewers the racism, sexism, materialism and violence of the times -the glitter turns out to have been cheap paint after all- and she does so in simple straight forward slice of life stories, and, more devastatingly, in allegorical, nightmarish tales -The Lottery, The Tooth, and The Daemon Lover, etc.

The Lottery -Its about atavism, superstition -about responding to the mystery, insecurity, and danger of life by making human sacrifices to the vulpine forces of nature in order to presumably save the majority through a kind of magical inoculation. This type of thinking is the antithesis of science. It is ancient, 'old brain' thinking and it shares a lot with some 'new age' thinking. I think it is also why we can sometimes justify sending our young people off to die in pointless wars in foreign countries. It is about unthinking adherence to ritual. It is about compartmentalizing our emotions and behaviour -allowing friendship and compassion to co-exist with murderous cruelty, in the same person, in the same community. The veneer of civilization is not that thick or that strong. Civilization is a modern, stylish bungalow, built over a deep, ancient dungeon, where savagery and perhaps evil still walks, and periodically comes up the damp winding staircase -witness the unspeakable atrocities on both sides of recent and current conflicts (e.g. Kosovo, Rwanda, Iraq.) No wonder this story generated the most mail of any story ever published in the New Yorker. It is truly disturbing. Bridge with the girls, or baseball and a few beers with boys wouldn't seem the same after reading this story.

Most readers will be familiar with "The Lottery", but Shirley Jackson is not a one-hit wonder; this collection is full of eerie, disturbing and understated stories, from the guy who gets slowly talked out of his own apartment to an overprotective grandmother aboard a Navy ship. Highly recommended.

Many people are familiar with the story "The Lottery," but it is just one of many incredible vignettes of life filling this collection. It is hard to understand today why "The Lottery" originally provoked such a strong reaction, yet it still packs a punch for first-time readers. While it does have aspects of horror, the remaining stories are basically literary. "Flower Garden" and "After You, My Dear Alphonse" deal with racism and would seem to be pretty bold statements for the time period (the book was published in 1948); the latter story seems particularly groundbreaking because of the unusual perspective it provides. "Charles" is a humorous yet illuminating look at the behavior of children, while "Afternoon in Linen" is an important statement on why children sometimes behave as they do. Jackson is at her best when describing the disenchanted adult. The helplessness of women is an important theme in many stories; many of the women described here feel helpless and subservient to their husbands, their neighbors, and their community. "Elizabeth" is a fairly long study of how one woman's wishes and dreams remain unfulfilled in later life. The housewife in "Got a Letter From Jimmy" is thoroughly exasperated by her husband's feelings, and since she cannot speak her mind to him, she is forced to fantasize about killing him. In "The Villager" a woman spontaneously chooses to become someone else entirely for a few minutes, and most of Jackson's heroines spend much time contemplating what could have been. In "Of Course," the fact that a new family has a few unorthodox views builds an unbreachable wall between brand-new neighbors. The women in these stories are always wondering what other people think about them and worrying about what others will say about them. Even when a group of women try to do something good to help the less fortunate, it backfires on them in "Come Dance With Me in Ireland." When a female character vacations with her husband in New York in "Pillar of Salt," she soon becomes "lost," afraid, and desperate to return home. "Colloquy" is the shortest story in the collection, but its protagonist speaks for most of Jackson's female characters when she asks whether she alone or the whole world has gone insane.

My favorite story here is "The Daemon Lover." Herein, Jackson offers one of the most poignant, touching looks at loneliness, desperation, and fragility I have ever read. In the story, we spend a day with the protagonist as she prepares for her wedding, having become engaged just the night before to a James Harris. It is a depressing yet beautiful story, and I actually rate it higher than "The Lottery." The character of James Harris actually flitters throughout several of these stories, a phantom of sorts haunting several of Jackson's more memorable female characters.

Jackson deals with very serious subjects, and the illumination provided by her unusual perspectives on life is vivid and poignant. When addressing racism, she shows how even an individual with the best of intentions and good will can still represent an unfortunate racist attitude. In speaking to morality and social values, she shows how hard it can be for an individual to go against tradition and the community to do what is right. She offers powerful insights on child (and adult) psychology. Even the couple of stories I did not really "get" offered insight into the living of life. Readers should not expect a book of horror stories when they pick up this book. The stories can be maudlin and even depressing, but they are philosophical, psychological, and sociological rather than creepy or spooky.

Many people are familiar with the story "The Lottery," but it is just one of many incredible vignettes of life filling this collection. It is hard to understand today why "The Lottery" originally provoked such a strong reaction, yet it still packs a punch for first-time readers. While it does have aspects of horror, the remaining stories are basically literary. "Flower Garden" and "After You, My Dear Alphonse" deal with racism and would seem to be pretty bold statements for the time period (the book was published in 1948); the latter story seems particularly groundbreaking because of the unusual perspective it provides. "Charles" is a humorous yet illuminating look at the behavior of children, while "Afternoon in Linen" is an important statement on why children sometimes behave as they do. Jackson is at her best when describing the disenchanted adult. The helplessness of women is an important theme in many stories; many of the women described here feel helpless and subservient to their husbands, their neighbors, and their community. "Elizabeth" is a fairly long study of how one woman's wishes and dreams remain unfulfilled in later life. The housewife in "Got a Letter From Jimmy" is thoroughly exasperated by her husband's feelings, and since she cannot speak her mind to him, she is forced to fantasize about killing him. In "The Villager" a woman spontaneously chooses to become someone else entirely for a few minutes, and most of Jackson's heroines spend much time contemplating what could have been. In "Of Course," the fact that a new family has a few unorthodox views builds an unbreachable wall between brand-new neighbors. The women in these stories are always wondering what other people think about them and worrying about what others will say about them. Even when a group of women try to do something good to help the less fortunate, it backfires on them in "Come Dance With Me in Ireland." When a female character vacations with her husband in New York in "Pillar of Salt," she soon becomes "lost," afraid, and desperate to return home. "Colloquy" is the shortest story in the collection, but its protagonist speaks for most of Jackson's female characters when she asks whether she alone or the whole world has gone insane.

My favorite story here is "The Daemon Lover." Herein, Jackson offers one of the most poignant, touching looks at loneliness, desperation, and fragility I have ever read. In the story, we spend a day with the protagonist as she prepares for her wedding, having become engaged just the night before to a James Harris. It is a depressing yet beautiful story, and I actually rate it higher than "The Lottery." The character of James Harris actually flitters throughout several of these stories, a phantom of sorts haunting several of Jackson's more memorable female characters.

Jackson deals with very serious subjects, and the illumination provided by her unusual perspectives on life is vivid and poignant. When addressing racism, she shows how even an individual with the best of intentions and good will can still represent an unfortunate racist attitude. In speaking to morality and social values, she shows how hard it can be for an individual to go against tradition and the community to do what is right. She offers powerful insights on child (and adult) psychology. Even the couple of stories I did not really "get" offered insight into the living of life. Readers should not expect a book of horror stories when they pick up this book. The stories can be maudlin and even depressing, but they are philosophical, psychological, and sociological rather than creepy or spooky.

The disturbing eeriness of the short story 'The Lottery' has stuck with me since my days of junior high school. Having never been exposed to any of Jackson's other work, I recently picked up _The Lottery and Other Short Stories_ hoping to find more morsels that equalled "The Lottery"s power. Did I find them? Nope - but I didn't find disappointment, either.
Jackson's short stories display a variety of themes, from thought-provoking political commentary to childlike whimsicality (and all points in-between). Likewise, some stories are well-developed, while others seem like little more than the skeleton jottings of an author's thoughts. When it's all said and done the stories provide worthwhile reading, but some are far more satisfying than others. "The Lottery" stands head and shoulders above the rest as the jewelled crownpiece; save it for last. It will stick with you like few stories you'll ever be priveleged to read.

Right, sure, The Lottery, classic, whatever. I'm really not a big fan of the title story in this volume, quite likely because my first exposure to it was through an absolutely horrendous dramatization that I'm sure some of you are familiar with. I wholeheartedly agree that it is very intriguing the first time around, what with the suspense and all, but it is simply not interesting enough to hold up to further scrutinization, nor is it as simple and affecting as the other stories in this volume, and I find it hard to enjoy the second and third time around. However, the 'and other stories' is what really makes this collection. They're truly the mirrors into the soul that 'The Lottery' has so long been praised as being. Single snapshots of tiny situations and individuals become stunningly beautiful snippets of prose. My personal favorite story in the collection, as well as in most collections, is 'The Witch', yet again a perfect glimpse into the passing lives of the individuals you see every day.

If you've never read "The Lottery," you're wasting valuable time reading this review. Go buy the book and read it instead. If you have read "The Lottery," then odds are you already appreciate this dark, brilliant, horrific little story. It's one of the greatest horror stories ever written, and it's one of my favorites of all time to teach, as well. My students were all shocked and horrified by the story (not least by the fact that I would give them something that so offended them), but by the end of the semester, they came to love the story. The set-up is brilliant, and the twist ending is perfect: brutal, shocking, and short. Other reviewers have commented on the story's excellence for teaching things like the evil of tradition; it's also an excellent way to teach how ordinary people could become involved in something like the Nazi death camps.
The rest of the stories in the collection are uniformly excellent, as well, although I would recommend saving "The Lottery" for last. It's by far the most horrific in the collection, but Jackson's satire can be just as brutal as her horror, and there is more than a little of the horror of everyday life sprinkled throughout the rest of these tales. A must-buy!

I first picked up this volume because, shocking as it may seem, I'd never actually read Shirley Jackson's landmark story "The Lottery." That's the last story in the book, so I skipped right to it; and, long story short, I wasn't quite as floored by it as I thought. (Full disclosure, though: I more or less knew the ending already.)
However, as I read through the rest of the stories in the book I was amazed at the range, depth, and general brilliance of Jackson's storytelling. Many of her stories tend to center around basic human cruelty (a theme made all the more powerful by the fact that the characters are mostly genteel females) and insanity. Jackson wrings plenty of drama out of these concepts, to be sure (many of the stories are downright chilling), but she's equally capable of playing them for laughs--in "My Life With R.H. Macy," a hilarious account of working in retail, and the "Come Dance With Me In Ireland," a perfect illustration of the pessimistic axiom, "No good deed goes unpunished."
"The Lottery and Other Stories" is an outstanding body of work from a woman who's clearly one of the best short-storytellers of the past century. It's going on my shelf right next to Raymond Carver's "Where I'm Calling From," and if you knew my reading habits, you'd know that's probably the finest compliment I could give a book.

This is my favorite book. The Lottery is a twisted way of thinking that could happen. When I first read the Lottery I was shocked. I thought that this could never happen in our world today. But after a reading in the newspaper of worse things towns do I thought that it could happen. Everyone was sad that they might get picked as the winner. But once the winner is picked, they are all relived and turn into crazed people casting stones at their once friend. It could have been them. Nobody stops to think that it could have been them. It could be them the next session

I read "The Lottery" fifty years ago, when Jackson was still alive. It had already become legendary by then. It seems to me to be basically a short version of "Lord of the Flies" with adults instead of children. I don't quite see what all the fuss was about. After all, the village in the story was just up the road from Salem, and what happens in the village is little different from what happened in real life in Salem.

Shirley Jackson is one of my favorite writers. The Lottery is a classic. Her writing is moody, psychologically twisted and creepy. Her stories are about ordinary people and ordinary communities who do extraordinarily frightening things. This seems to make some readers very uncomfortable and nervous -probably because they see themselves and/or their own communities in her stories.

Up until this year, I only knew of Shirley Jackson from the movie, The Haunting. A review of her work intrigued me, especially noting The Lottery. I have an affection for mid century writers (Carver, Cheever, Kerouac, Salinger). Was pleasantly surprised to see her work compared to Carver in A.M.Homes intro. Jackson is a master at short stories of the human scale, of depicting the complexities of suburban and small town life.

I first read this short story in highschool and to this day, I still remember it vividly, especially "It isn`t fair, it isn`t right,".
Villagers gather together in the central square for the annual lottery. There is much excitement and interest as the rituals of the event proceed. The familiar discussion of current and everyday happenings in village life is intermingled with commentary on the traditional and modern ways of holding the lottery, as well as observation of the particularities of this year's proceedings. Finally a winning family is chosen by ballot, and from that family a winning member--Mrs. Hutchinson. Mrs. Hutchinson is then stoned by the villagers, including her family members.

Although this book is filled with great stories, The Lottery is by far my favorite. I first read it in college and was in awe. What a great story. It was suspenseful, beautifully written, and most of all, disturbing. Shirley has a way of drawing readers in. I recommend anyone who enjoys great writing to check this one out.

No suspense tale has ever impressed me as the Lottery did; I mean, what can be more innocent than a small town lottery? But then the author gives it a great twist when she turns it into a horrible, inhumane tradition. Just for the originality of the idea I give it two stars, and the other three are for being so well written, it's just chilling. By the way, I also saw the movie starring Keri Russell, which is OK, but of course, not even comparable to the quality of the actual tale.

Sometimes quirky, often penetrating, these stories are generally engaging. She sees behind the external facade, looking into minds of people ranging from the depressed to the neurotic. The story 'Elizabeth' is particularly well done, covering a woman's desires to live a different life vs. the inertia of her racist family and their idyllic east coast town. Of course The Lottery is the capper -- a cruelly effective study of personality in a dystopian setting.

Not all of it is five-star (Pillar of Salt is overwrought, for instance) but overall this collection is well worth the effort.

I purchased this book on the fact that the Lottery is a great story and extremely eerie. Another reason for purchasing this was the overall high rating for this book by everyone. That was incredibly misleading. If you read thru the other reviews of this book closely, you will find that most people are telling you about the brilliance of the story "The Lottery" and not the other stories in this compilation.
I expected stories on par with the Lottery in this collection. I didn't find it. The majority of other stories do not fall in to the classification of horror stories like the Lottery or "The Haunting of Hill House" which Shirley Jackson is also so famous for. The stories would fall in to the region of American Literature, not horror or mystery. As some other reviewers have noted there are multiple stories that don't come to a conclusion as one would expect with either a horror or mystery story but are a poignant tale of literature.
I am a huge mystery buff and definitely part of the pull of this collection was that it was in the mystery section of my bookstore. That along with the other items I previously mentioned convinced me to buy it. If you find yourself buying this for mystery or horror stories, take a pass. If you are looking to reread "The Lottery" I would recommend taking this book out from the library. This purchase is only wise for literature enthusiasts.

Reminds me of, "The Twilight Zone."

Every year, a small town gathers together to perform a sacred ritual to ensure a good harvest. A box is passed around, and everyone picks a piece of paper. The person who grabs the paper with the coal mark on it is the "winner" of sorts. The end is not what you think. You'll be surprised, and horrified.

After I read this short story, I did some research on Google. A few "concerned" parents were upset that this story is recommended reading in high school English classes. Seriously! I think the story is brilliant. A must read for anyone. If you read it, you might just get the irony, and the lesson to be learned.

After seeing a rerun of the 1996 movie version of "The Lottery" on TV the other day, I once again find myself consumed with Shirley Jackson's genius in expressing the manifestation of evil that lies within each of us. As the Bible says, sin is universal (Romans 5:12); in the Scriptures we find Jesus Christ lecturing the Pharisees of his time that they are like "whitewashed tombs" in their hypocrisy (Matthew 23:27; Luke 11:44).
Even though "The Lottery" does not offer any recommendation for the redemption of mankind from ever-lurking evil, the 1948 short story retains enormous value in that it places the reader in the story. One can almost feel the rising temperatures of late morning in early summer in New England. If your ears are attuned, you can hear Mr. Summers' voice boom out the family names: "Adams. Delacroix. Hutchinson. Warner." If you allow yourself to enter the story, you not only sense the shifts in emotion among the villagers, you experience the emotional ride for yourself. And that is the genius of Jackson and "The Lottery." The founder of my church knew this genre well and often responded with stories (parables) when confronted with questions such as "And who is my neighbor?" (Luke 10:25-37, which, like "The Lottery", shocks first-time readers even today)
When I learned, just tonight, that "The Lottery" was first published in the New Yorker on JUNE 28 in 1948, I was not surprised to hear of the overwhelming response, even canceled subscriptions, to the publication. The date for the annual lottery in the story is June 27. Jackson's style is that of a news feature writer dispatched by a section editor of a major daily newspaper to capture off-the-beaten-track events. All that is missing is the dateline. To have read this all-too-realistic fiction in news-feature style on June 28 must have been bone-chilling, to say the least. Move over, H.G. Wells, Orson Welles, and "War of the Worlds"! In the movie version, the name of the town is New Hope, Maine. An idea for high school literature teachers presenting "The Lottery" is to lift the text onto a mock section front of a metropolitan daily that has a fictitious but convincing name. If the teacher is really creative, he or she could conspire with the journalism department and make the page look real, complete with a three-column color photo of "Mr. Summers" barking the names from the platform, with the box and three-legged stool in view, of course. A six-column headline that pulls the reader in but doesn't give away the ending would top the presentation. Then, the byline of By Shirley Jackson, Advocate Feature Writer. With the dateline of "NEW HOPE, Maine -- The morning of June 27 was bright and clear....", Jackson's use of "the village" and "here" would be given even more realistic context.
Like the parables of Jesus, Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" has a timeless quality. Unless Christ, Jackson offers no solutions to the problem of evil. But her 20th-century parable does force the reader to confront the horrible reality of evil. In that "The Lottery" continues to be of great service to mankind.

Shirley Jackson is currently one of my favorite authors. (And, incidentily always has been, since elementary school.) She is the author that everyone has some sort of familiarity with, unbeknownst to them. From The Lottery, to The Haunting of Hill House, to We Have Always Lived In the Castle, there is a sort of haunting timelessness in her work. No matter where you grew up, what your background, you will always find a common thread to link you to her world. And in her world, you will find, (if you pay attention) a parable to our times, a guessing game of "could it really?.." and, "did it ever?"... After all of these questions, you will find yourself answering, yes, yes it did...

J.E. Gotowos (teacher of EFL, German, and drama): I recently let the students of a senior high-school class I am teaching in Hamburg, Germany, read, discuss, and evaluate Shirley Jackson's short story The Lottery. Here are the comments they came up with:
---------------- Charlotte Oszkinat & Katja Schnur: >> obscure and paralyzing << A strange story. Dark, sick, disturbing. Although it's quite obvious how everything will end, we enjoyed reading it. - And it definitely makes you think. ---------------
Fabian Schmid: I think the story is very awkward and strange. I had to read it for more than three times to get the message across. But I still can't understand why the punishment was the aim to reach. The old people wanted to keep the traditions up in their village. So they played the game. In my opinion it would be better to leave such traditions behind. But on the other side I can also imagine the fun it could be. To say it in one word: „strange!!!!!" -------------
Kristin Bernstein & Katja Lesche: A story overwhelming in its twisting at the end. Both of us won't forget the surprise and shock we got reading the short story "the lottery". The story shows how deep we are settled within our society and its culture. The story made us think about the normal values and norms of our society and how an unexpected twist could let them erupt in such a strong way. -------------
Christian Hamm & Cosima May: This book is absolutely boring.The story is quite strange. It creates in a way a dark atmosphere, but in a negative way. The story is to fictional and the whole action is described in a to detailed way. After you have finished the first page you already know the end of the story. The story is absolutely boring and if you are looking for a story with some tension in it „The Lottery" is the wrong book for you. --------------
Lisa Schwelien & Janeke Masanke: After all we liked it. We both have the opinion that the story is shocking. While talking about this shock-effect we agreed that it makes the reader think. We thought about how they stone people in the movie „Life of Brian". That was funny. But in regard to the fact that stoning people was a wide spread penalty in former times (it still exists in some countries), the story seemed critical to us. We reflected: Many people like sensation, to see how somebody is dying. We are not curios. The law says that a murderer can be executed so we are not curios watching him die. And when a simple lottery decides who has to die we are not curios either... ---------------
Daniel Andresen: I read the story just once. It was very hard to read, because it was so annoying to me reading this piece, that I had a problem to focus my mind on it. I can't remember any book I've ever read that was so annoying and headache causing. It is really an unforgettable book. ---------------
Fredj Ben Halima: The Lottery is as shocking and amusing as a good horror movie. I think this story is unique and no other story comes close. Although The Lottery is not my favorite book, I like it very much nevertheless. ----------------
Stephanie Hopfe & Anne Möller: The whole first part of the short story, "The Lottery", is pretty boring and keeps the reader in a lack of clarity about the ending of the story. Because of this extremely long beginning does the end achieves a dramatically and shocking size. ----------------
Julia Stripling & Anna Blechschmidt: NOT REALLY? The story „The Lottery" is too long and therefore too boring for the short content. It is difficult to draw conclusions between the story and reality. That is why it only should shock the reader by letting him feel the power of traditions and the society. The horror should never have an end but the identification with the characters of the story does not work. -----------------
Nina Moniac & Britta Requard: The Lottery is an eerily fascinating story full of growing, captivating suspense. The startling outcome will take your breath away. Still, the story sticks with you,, because of its undeniable underlying truth. Metaphorically, it demonstrates to us the high price society pays for a shiny facade: chaos keeps bubbling underneath, ready to break free and lash out. Society needs a vent to control atavistic human urges. This story will get you to think about the concept of civilization, and you as a part of it. ------------------

For me, both as a reader and writer, naturalism is an extremely important narrative quality. Jackson's "The Lottery" is an ideologically engaging product of the age in which it was written. Only problem I have with it is that it isn't natural; it isn't something that could actually have happened. Which, to me, makes it somewhat Shakespearean, i.e., much ado about nothing.

The text leads you to believe that the lottery is a large harmless social event that the community is involved in. Old Man Warner speaks of the great tradition for over 77 years that he had participated in the lottery. With the children involved, it was shocking to find out what the town was drawing for! The sudden grotesque ending gave meaning and life to the book. Very well written.

I read reviews that described this collection of stories as brilliant, scary, artfully crafted, etc. I honestly don't get it!! The stories are strange, seeming unfinished in many cases, lacking detail, and seem to stop in the middle of the stories. I'm very confused by the high ratings.

There were two main reasons why I decided to read this book: 1) I read "We Have Always Lived in the Castle" this month and was moderately interested in Shirley Jackson's style, and 2) I heard about the story "The Lottery" from my wife, which only helped peak my curiosity. So I borrowed the book from the public library and went straight to "The Lottery", which happens to be the very last story in the book. This story gave me, once again, a good taste for her ability to describe places, characters, and what may seem at fist a very mundane scene and... WHAMMO, hit you with a plot twist that catches you unaware and gasping for air. "This book should be a thrilling roller-coaster ride," I thought.

Well, to be honest I felt that "The Lottery" was by far the darkest of the whole lot. The rest of the other stories, for the most part, were very well thought out, organized and with a plot twist in the end, but the surprises were of a different type: they leave you wondering if you missed something and the questions "what just happened here?" and "huh???" were frequently uttered by yours truly as I read the entire book. Most stories do show a hint of weirdness and sometimes the creepiness is very subtle... but just when you think you know where you're headed and you find yourself bracing for the end, she blindfolds you, spins you around 10 times and leaves you in a totally different place, time and with a strange taste in your mouth.

You may think that after all this I would now proclaim that I would never touch one of her stories... but to be honest, I find that I'm even more interested to learn about this author and this style of hers.