The Lottery, and Other Stories

"The Lottery is often considered one of the best American short stories of all time, and is taught in writing programmes all over the world. It’s about a small American community, which appears to be holding some kind of regular ballot. It’s just a normal part of their world. Everyone knows it’s going on. As a reader, you’re feeling very alienated by the mystery of this seemingly mundane thing. But as the story reaches its close, you begin to realise that what they are voting for is to stone a member of the community to death. It’s never explicitly spelled out why, just that it happens, that it needs to happen, and will happen without question. I think it’s interrogating the idea of the status quo, of doing something simply because it’s tradition. And it’s a forerunner of films like The Wicker Man and Midsommar . Those have that sense of the ritual sacrifice to redeem and cleanse an entire community. It was hugely controversial, as you say. This was a woman, a mother, the wife of an academic, who wrote for ladies magazines, writing a story in which a woman gets stoned to death at the end. Probably the controversy helped with its success. There’s a really lovely letter from Jackson where she says something along the lines, people probably read the story anticipating that someone would win a washing machine. There’s a discomfort in working within the domestic genre, but doing something strange and horrific. It’s such a probing commentary on the insidiousness, or the viciousness, of small communities. Her work is absolutely about the evil that lies beneath the surface of normality, the nasty things that people do together in the white picket fence towns. She relocates gothic horror from the forest to the suburbs."