Patti Abbot has long been the gatekeeper of the Forgotten Book Friday blogs, which have often expanded to cover movies, television shows/episodes, short stories and so on. Bloggers from all over the net send links to Patti and then folks wander around reading what everyone else has chosen to talk about. Now and again Patti organizes a “special” and we all talk about the same author. Well I am pleased as punch to tell you that today’s author requiring all our attention is none other than Shirley Jackson, the great American writer of Gothic and Mystery. And let’s not forget her “mom” humor as exhibited in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons.
But I digress from the stories that leap to mind at the mere mention of Shirley Jackson’s name. Show me a high school student who hasn’t cringed at the end of Miss Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery.” Some time ago I talked about that and some of her other work over at Criminal Element:
Rarely does anyone think of The New Yorker magazine as a place to go to get a quick fix of horror fiction. And yet in 1948 that well-respected magazine published just such a story, which caused great controversy and stirred up a tremendous amount of hate mail. It also was the cause of numerous readers cancelling subscriptions.
The story was published during a time when many town governments across America sponsored weekly cash-prize lotteries as a means of bringing people into town from the surrounding farms to stimulate the postwar economy for the local merchants. The name of the story was, of course, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson.
Click through to Criminal Element for the rest of the article.
And for more articles and insights into Shirley Jackson and her fascinating body of work, visit Patti Abbott for a list of links.
Terrie
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