When I was growing up and the calendar turned to the month of October, I eagerly anticipated the ever-shortening days. For a fan of horror fiction, both literary and cinematic, the darkening skies were companionable — as was, of course, Halloween’s approach.
On weekends, my father turned off the lights for my brother and me as we told ghost stories. Complete darkness was also ideal for watching old horror films. The truth is that Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster and Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates are only truly frightening when their faces provide the only illumination in a room. And it is not for nothing that the popular series of young adult horror books, recently adapted into a successful feature film, was titled Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark.
My young mind, no doubt like that of so many others, was trained to associate the absence of light with ghosts, goblins, and the simple satisfactions of being scared in safety. For me, that meant within the confines of suburbia. As a teenager, though, I first encountered a classic horror short story that dispensed with the cozy darkness of autumn and instead made use of the sun-dappled brightness of summer. Its inversion of the usual parameters of instinctual fear is why I still think of it today.
Writer Shirley Jackson published “The Lottery” in the New Yorker in June 1948, where, in no time at all, it prompted letter-writers from coast to coast to register their distress. “It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open,” Jackson claimed in her 1960 essay “Biography of a Story,” referring to those who wrote in to complain about “The Lottery.” She said, “Of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends.”
What was it about “The Lottery” that so exercised the readers of a magazine as well-mannered as the New Yorker? The story — which is most commonly encountered today as part of Jackson’s collection, The Lottery and Other Stories, published 70 years ago — can certainly lay claim to a genuinely unsettling premise: Out of fealty to a superstitious tradition, a village picks one day a year to convene a lottery in which the recipient of a slip with a black mark is targeted for a communal stoning.
Perhaps Jackson, as skillful a writer who ever worked in the horror genre, intuited that it would have been too obvious to set such a story among barren trees and cold winds. Instead, Jackson decided that the tale would unfold most vividly on a vibrant day in June not unlike the day when she dreamed up the plot. “I had written the story . . . on a bright June morning when summer seemed to have come at last, with blue skies and warm sun and no heavenly signs to warn me that my morning’s work was anything but just another story,” Jackson wrote in “Biography of a Story.”
Jackson opens the story in the manner of a forecast from The Old Farmer’s Almanac: “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 setting enables the writer to juxtapose the innocent trappings of early summer, boys and girls still getting accustomed to being free from the classroom for a few months, with the gruesome particulars of the lottery. Even Jackson’s phrasing is homey: “The women, wearing faded house dresses and sweaters, came shortly after their menfolk.”
Lottery ringleader, and head honcho of square dances and Halloween programs, Mr. Summers cuts a casually dashing figure in his “clean white shirt and blue jeans.” But such quaint details only serve to reinforce the awfulness of the lottery. After all, Mr. Summers (what a name!) does not flinch when the dreaded black-marked slip lands in the hands of poor, pitiful Tessie Hutchinson, making an ordinary housewife a sacrificial lamb to the village’s paranoia. The story’s final words, as Tessie is confronted with villagers bearing stones, retain their startling force. Jackson writes: “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs. Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.”
To readers in 1948, it was, as we might say today, too real. “I have read ‘The Lottery’ three times with increasing shock and horror. … Cannot decide whether [Jackson] is a genius or a female and more subtle version of Orson Welles,” wrote one, according to a 2013 piece by Jackson biographer Ruth Franklin. A film producer admitted, “All of us here have been grimly moved by Shirley Jackson’s story. … Was it purely an imaginative flight, or do such tribunal rituals still exist and, if so, where?” Academics weren’t sure if it was fiction or sociology.
But perhaps the best reason “The Lottery” horrifies even those well aware that it isn’t real is the setting. In choosing summertime for the story, Jackson makes the vital point that sunlight is not, in fact, the best disinfectant. As depicted in the story, the lottery itself has the trappings of democracy. After all, Tessie is not singled out for any ostensible transgression but rather is the victim of chance. And the black box in which the slips are placed, and from which they are plucked, calls to mind a ballot box. More than seven decades after its first appearance, the story reminds us that mob rule can take root no matter the season or time of day.
I wouldn’t have believed it when I was 8 or 9 years old, but “The Lottery” proves decisively that horror can be found both in the dead of night and in the light of day. Happy Halloween.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review, and Humanities.
