The Lottery by Shirley Jackson is a short story, but I read this story in a collection of other short stories. I read Jackson's more popular works, The Haunting of Hill House and We Always Lived in the Castle, last fall, so I was really excited to read more of her work. This collection, while incredibly well-written, was not my favorite of hers.
What I admired about Jackson's writing is the balance of normalcy and horror she creates in her writing. I felt like it was just subtle enough that it just all comes together at the end, and the mundanity of the story is what made the stories honestly more horrifying. While this is captured in each short stories, I felt like I preferred the longer books to the short stories. Each short story felt too short for me to the point that it was difficult for me to sometimes absorb either the normalcy of the stories or the horrific aspects.
I also found it difficult to see how the stories were cohesive because they didn't feel like they fit together for me, but I'm not sure if that's what the point of this collection was. Maybe that's just me, but I felt like I was always missing something in the stories or if there was supposed to be a common thread among the stories. Despite this, I felt like each story was very distinct and showed how vast Jackson's writing technique ranged during her lifetime.
Have you read The Lottery or any of Shirley Jackson's short stories? What did you think of them?
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