A review by bookishbrighton
The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

4.0

I’ve never read a book of short stories before and I’m not convinced they’re entirely my thing, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book and if there was any book of short stories to try, this is it! Shirley really is the queen of creepy. I noticed a few reoccurring themes - apartments, identity loss/theft, kids laughing about awful things they don’t understand - the overall feeling for me was ‘unsettling’. Some of the particularly short ones with a lot of dialogue (eg the first story, ‘The Intoxicated’) felt like they could be a scene in a Tarantino film, and some of the others had a Hitchcock vibe; I would love to see some of these turned into sketches or written into films. The only reasons I didn’t give it 5 stars are because 1) some of the stories in the middle created a bit of a lull for me - it was like they’d stuck the not-so-great ones all together in the middle to create a sh*t sandwich; and 2) because some of them were very clearly unfinished as opposed to short, and they felt that way. However, the stories themselves are so good and well written.
If you like creepy, unsettling and/or odd, this is an absolute must read.