Most of you have probably read Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” It’s the late author’s most famous short story, and has been assigned reading in public high schools for decades.
I knew next to nothing about Jackson herself, however, until I read this essay by Victoria Best.
It’s long been fashionable to cite “The Lottery” as a warning against the dangers of conformity—dangers that are self-evident to the Baby Boomers who grew up reading Jackson’s work and who, in turn, taught Gen-Xers like me. But as Best points out, the much more frightening possibility is that “the terrifying face of evil [is] part of ordinary people and small town life.” It’s a common theme in all of Jackson’s writing—something she herself referred to as “the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behaviour.”
