Despite being a fan of scary stories I had never read
anything by the legendary horror writer Shirley Jackson until last year when I stumbled upon
and was completely blown away by We Have
Always Lived in the Castle. Upon finishing this wonderfully creepy novel, I
felt eager to read more by Jackson, and immediately added both The Lottery and Other Stories and The Haunting of Hill House to my
‘to-read’ list.
The
Lottery and Other Stories is a collection of strange, ambiguous
and at times unsettling short stories. Many of them feature a mysterious ‘Mr
Harris’ character; In fact it was originally published as The Lottery: The Adventures of James Harris, but he doesn’t
actually appear in all the stories so I’m unsure as to why this should be the
case.
I cannot deny that Shirley Jackson’s writing is superb;
she certainly has a real way with words and succeeds in creating an atmosphere
and sucking you in to her tales. However, contrary to popular opinion, I didn’t enjoy this collection. As I have already said, a key element the majority
of these tales share is ambiguity, which can be fine, but these particular stories take
this to the extreme; so much so that many of them end abruptly without anything
being resolved and oftentimes without anything having happened at all! Apart
from the recurrence of James Harris, there seems to be little that ties this
group of stories together. For example, on the one hand we have ‘The Lottery’, which is very mysterious and has a shock reveal
at the end, and it keeps you hooked and intrigued about what on earth is going
on in the little village. However most of the others I would barely qualify as
stories at all, and are what I can only describe as random segments of life or filler
scenes from a longer novel, and I found this quite infuriating since well over
half of the collection is of this nature. The tales that fall into this
category include: ‘Like Mother Used to Make’; ‘The Villager’ and ‘An Afternoon
in Linen’, amongst others. Even one of the longer ones, ‘Elizabeth’, which
initially I thought was pretty decent and intriguing just sort of, well, ended
at a really peculiar point in the story and I was left feeling thoroughly
dissatisfied with it.
Despite the negatives there are some enjoyable stories
in this collection: the title story ‘The Lottery’ was brilliant, and I would
also recommend ‘The Daemon Lover’; ‘The Witch’; ‘The Renegade’ and ‘Seven Types
of Ambiguity’. Even
so, apart from ‘The Lottery’ itself, these stories are not anything particularly
special, and are not commendable enough as to render the entire collection
as good; I felt that the poor stories certainly overshadowed the better ones.
This collection of short stories is generally well
reviewed, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Perhaps Jackson is more skilled
as a novel writer, because We Have
Always Lived in the Castle was truly fantastic and I am still looking
forward to the prospect of reading The
Haunting of Hill House. Unfortunately though, The Lottery and Other Stories just didn’t do it for me; I found I
was bored for most of it, and it was a bit of a struggle to get through. I
would, however, recommend reading some of her short stories individually, such
as the ones I listed above, but I wouldn’t bother with the entire collection.
Rating: 4/10 as a collection, 9/10 for 'The Lottery' alone.
My other Shirley Jackson reviews:
The Haunting of Hill House
My other Shirley Jackson reviews:
The Haunting of Hill House
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