The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

Here too are Jackson’s masterly short novels The Haunting of Hill House (1959), the tale of an achingly empathetic young woman chosen by a haunted house to be its new tenant, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962), the unrepentant confessions of Miss Merricat Blackwood, a cunning adolescent who has gone to quite unusual lengths to preserve her ideal of family happiness. Also among these early works are “The Daemon Lover,” a story Oates praises as “deeper, more mysterious, and more disturbing than ‘The Lottery,’” and “Charles,” the hilarious sketch that launched Jackson’s secondary career as a domestic humorist. She opens with The Lottery (1949), Jackson’s only collection of short fiction, whose disquieting title story-one of the most widely anthologized tales of the twentieth century-has entered American folklore. In this volume Joyce Carol Oates, our leading practitioner of the contemporary Gothic, presents the essential works of Shirley Jackson, the novels and stories that, from the early 1940s through the mid-1960s, wittily remade the genre of psychological horror for an alienated, postwar America. We are shocked when their dreams become nightmares, and terrified by Jackson’s suggestion that there are unseen powers-“demons” both subconscious and supernatural-malevolently conspiring against human happiness. We are moved by these characters’ dreams, for they are the dreams of love and acceptance shared by us all.

“It is a place where things are not what they seem even on a morning that is sunny and clear there is always the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse.” Jackson’s characters-mostly unloved daughters in search of a home, a career, a family of their own-chase what appears to be a harmless dream until, without warning, it turns on its heel to seize them by the throat. “The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable,” writes A.

Save $15 when you buy both Shirley Jackson volumes in a deluxe boxed set.

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson