Yesterday I finished reading Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery and Other Stories. This 1949 anthology of her short stories was the only collection to be published in her lifetime. Jackson has steadily accumulated a reputation as one of the preëminent American horror writers of the twentieth century, and true to form, The Lottery and Other Stories was a haunting collection.

What brought me here? I doubt I could have said much about Shirley Jackson a mere two months ago. February changed that. Benjamin Dreyer (Dreyer’s English) had copy-edited one of her posthumous collections on behalf of her estate, and Stephen King (On Writing) made numerous references to her as an inspiration in his own genre. Both writers had no shortage of praise for her qualities as a prose stylist—in short, she’s a writer’s writer*.

As February trembled on the brink of March, I resolved to read one story a night. A slow, methodical drip of mid-century realism laced with wrenching social horror, all in the silence of my room against a bedside lamp. Some evenings I skipped my appointed reading, others I read two. Yesterday it all culminated in her most famous story (and the only one I had heard of before this year), “The Lottery”. My gosh was that a ride.

So what of her prose? My chief impression is that it felt like the pinnacle of essayist Paul Graham’s saltintesta philosophy: the words should jump directly into your mind, as if you weren’t aware they were there on the page at all. No stilted constructions, no falling afoul of that Mark Twain directive: “Use the right word, not its second cousin”. Every word was deliberately placed for illumination. Her prose was elegant without being overbearing, certainly not purple. No glittering just for the sake of glittering. No poetry getting in the way of the story (but certainly, there was poetry). And yet her writing glinted with a certain je ne sais quoi that I can only call style. I think I can now recognise a certain Shirley Jackson-ness underlying her writing.

And what of her narratives themselves? That’s a different story. My primary emotion here was a delectable unease. Jackson refracts contemporary (1940s) America into something strange and grotesque. Her characters do strange things under purely social compulsion that they can’t quite explain afterward. Alienation is a frequent ailment of her characters, particularly the ones who find themselves newly in or out of New York. A nasty kind of social disappearance, flailing around and gasping for water as you find yourself swallowed up by society, helpless and mute. It’s all so disturbing how real her vision is.

“The Lottery” was a doozy. That one will stick with me for a while like gunk between teeth. By God, the execution here was exquisite. The tension was delicious and palpable as she described the town’s preparation and carrying out of the ritual. The ending was satisfyingly horrifying. Strangely, I am attuned to how easily destructive mobs form in the Internet age, blue-checks gathering in critical mass to destroy a randomly selected person accused of arbitrary wrongspeak, so seeing this deadly dynamic play out here absent any moral context—this is just how human nature is—gave me chills. This also gave me hints of Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”.

Other stories that made an outsized impression on me the first time around: “The Daemon-Lover”, “Like Mother Used to Make”, “The Renegade”, “Afternoon in Linen”.

*I’m aware that this term’s meaning is now nebulous and its tone occasionally sarcastic, so to clarify I mean this with nothing but positive affect. A writer whom other writers read, or aspire to become. Sort of like how Buddy Clark was a singer’s singer or Jacob Collier a musician’s musician. Taste is subjective, though.