Writing Style

Domesticity and the Macabre

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.

Of all Miss Jackson’s eerie and gruesome fantasies, “The Lottery,” published in The New Yorker magazine, was the best known and most baffling to readers.

The dark and sinister story, opening on a quiet note, describes with mounting suspense, an annual village lottery to select a ritual victim to be put to death by stoning. The excitement is all in the selection of the woman’s name from slips of paper in a black box.

The stoning itself is dispassionately cold-blooded. The magazine received hundreds of letters, virtually all of them demanding to know what the tale meant