In 1948, The New Yorker published a short story about a macabre lottery in an anonymous, middle-American town square.

The response? Scores of complaint letters and dozens of cancelled subscriptions. For Shirley Jackson, the author, there came death threats and a place on the list of America’s most-banned works of literature.

Jackson, who died in 1965, is a cult figure in the US. Over here, her work has long been out of print — a tragedy remedied by Penguin, which has reissued her collection of short stories (and novels The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle). Finally, Jackson is let loose on the British public.

It’s worth the wait, if only for the title story. It’s a landmark piece that, over 11 pages, moves from a vaguely sinister opening towards a horrific climax.

But the sad truth is that nothing else quite lives up to The Lottery. A few come close: The Daemon Lover, in which a young woman must trace the fiancé who has vanished but seems tantalisingly near by; or The Renegade, which foreshadows The Lottery’s themes of brutality in small-town America, though this time directed at a recently arrived family’s pet dog. Perhaps less ominous (though equally disturbing) is Elizabeth, a cruel study of jealousy and power played out between two female colleagues.

Jackson’s tales, with their cinematic flavour, invite comparison with Polanski’s Apartment Trilogy (indeed, many are set in apartments). They share the same urban menace, creeping dread, and sense of tormenting alienation. Jackson is often credited as a horror writer but, as these stories show, that is too glib a description, particularly in the context of 1950s and 1960s horror, filled with lurid monsters and hammy Vincent Price characters.

Jackson’s work is far more sophisticated than that: instead of quick shocks and explicitly deplorable villains, she employs subtle undertones of eeriness and dread.

With such remarkable craft behind them, these stories may, at first, seem merely alluring; but in the end, they reveal themselves to be nothing less than utterly devastating and wholly unforgettable.

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
Penguin Classics, £9.99; 320pp Buy the book

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