WARNING: Lots of spoilers in this review! Turn back now if you haven't read The Lottery yet!
Me: Great! Just picked up Shirley Jackson's short stories collection. Looking forward to reading some of them pretty soon. I think I'm going to start with The Lottery.
Mom: Oh, is that the one where they stone the woman to death?
Thanks Mom.
It's hard for me to review this because it was so expertly spoiled for me, and I always have a hard time reading something and giving it an honest shot when I already know the reveal, especially when the reveal is the most impactful part of the story, as it is with The Lottery.
Jackson's strength has always been maintaining an air of normalcy and serving up the weirdness with a slow-drip, as if you're the frog who doesn't notice the water temperature is slowly rising until you're speeding headfirst into a tree to end the novel with your own suicide boiling. The Lottery is similar in this regard, as there are subtle hints that something's off ("wait, why are these boys collecting rocks?") while remaining otherwise focused on the dry minutiae of daily village life.
Jackson's pacing of the story is its strength. She maintains a perfect grasp of just how much normalcy to feed the reader before dropping the bomb, and the story ends at the perfect location as well, leaving the juicy violence to the reader's imagination rather than indulging us all and describing it in detail.
My only wish is that there was more depth, but what's absent becomes the real meat of the story. Why is this tradition in place? Why haven't the people seen fit to do away with it yet, as other villages have? Jackson's depiction of tradition as being a weight around the ankle of a drowning man is nothing new now, but was core to the feeling of the time in which she was writing and provides ample chewing material beyond this short story's runtime.
A neat little story that captures what Shirley Jackson does best.
⭐⭐⭐
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