Shirley Jackson lived a life fraught with paranoia, alienation, and cruelty – experiences she was able to channel into her fiction:
The six novels she wrote, and the attendant short story collections, all shared the same theme, Jackson said, “an insistence on the uncontrolled, unobserved wickedness of human behaviour.” She excelled at writing narrative that went through the looking glass and found beyond it not simply absurdity but malevolence. The switch happened in an instant, a lightning strike that turned a colour image into its negative. “It was Shirley’s genius,” [biographer] Judy Oppenheimer claims, “to be able to paint homey, familiar scenes … and then imbue them with evil – or, more correctly, allow a reader to see the evil that had been obvious to her all along.”
Her most famous story, “The Lottery,” is the most perfect example.
It tells the story of ordinary townspeople gathering together to draw lots according to a long-held tradition. When one housewife holds up the piece of paper with the single black spot, her neighbours, with deliberate and eager intent, turn upon her and stone her to death. The story created outrage on publication in 1948 in The New Yorker, described in letters to the magazine office as “gruesome” and “a new low in human viciousness.” But Jackson preferred to quote the letters she received from readers who “wanted to know where the lotteries were being held, and if they could go watch.”
Jackson’s audacity was to suggest that the terrifying face of evil was part of ordinary people and small town life. She knew what she was saying: “everything I write,” she told her publisher, was concerned with “the sense which I feel, of a human and not very rational order struggling inadequately to keep in check forces of great destruction.” Her advice to writers that “so long as you write it away regularly, nothing can hurt you,” makes it likely she knew whereof she spoke.
The New Yorker has published a previously unreleased story by Jackson, “Paranoia,” available here (subscription required), along with an interview with her son, Laurence Jackson Hyman, who offers a glimpse into her sillier side:
In real life Shirley had a wonderful sense of humor, and had a jovial laugh she got from her father, counter-balanced by the polite, proper persona she learned from her mother. There were always jokes in our house, especially at meals, where we each had to tell one. Both my parents were great jokesters. They would leave funny notes and drawings around the house, literary puzzles, playful poems on doors.
The Dish 