The Lottery by Shirley Jackson
But it’s not fair!
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.
Le Guin, Ursula. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. 1973.
Why we loved it
No surprise—we loved it. Of course we did. Shirley Jackson, the undisputed queen of suburban horror, works her dark magic once again in The Lottery. With her signature slow-burn tension, she invites us to a 1940s village so wholesome it could be Norman Rockwell’s backyard—kids gathering stones like they’re picking wildflowers, neighbors chatting about crops and taxes. That’s Jackson’s genius: she makes you lean in close, disarmed by the familiar, before pulling the rug out with one of literature’s most devastating final paragraphs.
The outrage was immediate. When The New Yorker published this in June 1948, readers canceled subscriptions and sent letters demanding explanations. “Who is this Shirley Jackson?” one baffled editor scribbled in the margins of the hate mail. But here’s what those furious readers missed: Jackson wasn’t writing about some made-up town. She was holding up a warped mirror to postwar America’s own rituals—the way communities will justify any cruelty as “tradition,” so long as it keeps the trains running on time.
What chills us most isn’t the stoning itself, but how ordinary the violence feels. Notice how Jackson never describes the victim’s screams? How the townspeople hurry to finish so they can get home for supper? That’s the real horror: evil doesn’t arrive in capes and monologues. It wears a cardigan and carries a clipboard.
So here’s the question that’s haunted us since we first read it: Could you—would you—speak up if your name wasn’t drawn? Or would you, like Mrs. Delacroix (whose name literally means “of the cross”), pick up the biggest stone you could carry?
Read it (or re-read it), then tell us where you’d stand in the comments.