Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery,” begins like this:

The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green. The people of the village began to gather in the square, between the post office and the bank, around ten o’clock; in some towns there were so many people that the lottery took two days and had to be started on June 2th. but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours, so it could begin at ten o’clock in the morning and still be through in time to allow the villagers to get home for noon dinner.

It’s a chilling tale, you may remember, and if you don’t, you can read it all here. I didn’t remember the first outrage to it back in 1948. “‘The Lottery’ was met with much negativity which surprised both the author and The New Yorker, and ultimately caused many subscribers to cancel their subscriptions and send hate mail.”

Nowadays, they tell the same moral in children’s movies. I remember Rabbit in one of the clumsier Winnie the Pooh movies singing about following the map over your own eyes. Ignore your senses; follow tradition and the book–which was to say how ridiculous it is to follow anything but your own senses. But Miss Jackson may have intended far more than that in “The Lottery.” Her NY Times obit states:

“Shirley Jackson wrote in two styles. She could describe the delights and turmoils of ordinary domestic life with detached hilarity; and she could, with cryptic symbolism, write a tenebrous horror story in the Gothic mold in which abnormal behavior seemed perilously ordinary.

In either genre, she wrote with remarkable tautness and economy of style, and her choice of words and phrases was unerring in building a story’s mood.”