Book review: The Lottery and Other Stories

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson.
My rating: five stars

A short review for a short book: read it.

Look, I should probably do a bit more than that.

This is the first collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson that I’d read, and from what I gather it’s the only one I really need to. (That’s not to say that I won’t, just that this seems to be the prevailing sentiment.)

I had read a tie-in copy of The Haunting of Hill House (retitled The Haunting and covered with a terrible movie poster graphic) following the release of the most recent film version. That was some years ago, and while I remember a certain poignancy of prose, I didn’t really remember anything else. But being a spooky story, I assumed that Jackson was a spooky writer.

These stories made me reconsider that pigeonholing. I mean, yeah, she is. But that’s really the least of her talents. What the stories in these collection foreground is her skill at observation, and the adroit dissection of the quotidian horrors of the everyday. Indeed, some of the best stories in here are ones that run a scant couple of pages, in which not much seems to occur – but they’re so larded with the dread of modern life, the prejudices of societies and the creeping horror of the clean kitchen that they’re almost claustrophobically intense.

There’s no way Stephen King’s Derry stories exist without these precursors. I refuse to believe it. Giving this collection five stars was the easiest rating choice I’ve had in a while.

(Miraculously, I hadn’t had the titular story spoiled for me, somehow. I saw where it was going immediately, but even so, it absolutely thrilled.)

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