The Lottery and Other Stories
by Shirley Jackson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Shirley JacksonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2005-03-16
ISBN: 0374529531
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Book Reviews of The Lottery and Other Stories
Book Review: A Dark and Magnificent Brilliance
Summary: 5 Stars
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, Amazon Reviewer
Summary of The Lottery and Other Stories
The Lottery, one of the most terrifying stories written in this century, created a sensation when it was first published in The New Yorker. "Power and haunting," and "nights of unrest" were typical reader responses. This collection, the only one to appear during Shirley Jackson's lifetime, unites "The Lottery:" with twenty-four equally unusual stories. Together they demonstrate Jack son's remarkable range--from the hilarious to the truly horrible--and power as a storyteller.
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