Review
It is a fascinating and a well-written tale. It’s mystery has really driven me in pursuing further into the book.
I really like how it paced and has given you ambiguity over it’s main point. I don’t find it fitting of it’s horror genre, but I would not deny the crippling fear it has given me while reading it.
The mysteriousness of the story adds-up to why the book is absolutely interesting. But, mystery and enigma does not only shroud the story itself, it also includes all the characters.
It’s characters that are so profoundly interesting that they are the ones that made me hooked in this book. It is an absolute enigma how they did not have indifference despite what had actually happened. In my opinion, they are the reason why the whole story has been eerie.
To a careful reader, it is very easy to identify who murdered the whole Blackwood family.
The psychological nuance the characters possess gives you the most astonishing feeling. Despite the protagonists’ weird way of thinking, I could not help but to still root for her.
I am so amazed by how Shirley Jackson has written her characters. They are so elegantly written.
The only complaint I have is not with the book, but how I have read it while listening to the audio book. It did not only took a considerably longer time to finish. But it also severed the deeper connection I would have experience reading the book alone
All in all, I really liked the story and the characters of this book. I highly recommend you check it out.
About the Author
Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson.
She is best known for her dystopian short story, “The Lottery” (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. In her critical biography of Shirley Jackson, Lenemaja Friedman notes that when Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” was published in the June 28, 1948, issue of The New Yorker, it received a response that “no New Yorker story had ever received.” Hundreds of letters poured in that were characterized by, as Jackson put it, “bewilderment, speculation and old-fashioned abuse.”
Jackson’s husband, the literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, wrote in his preface to a posthumous anthology of her work that “she consistently refused to be interviewed, to explain or promote her work in any fashion, or to take public stands and be the pundit of the Sunday supplements. She believed that her books would speak for her clearly enough over the years.” Hyman insisted the darker aspects of Jackson’s works were not, as some critics claimed, the product of “personal, even neurotic, fantasies”, but that Jackson intended, as “a sensitive and faithful anatomy of our times, fitting symbols for our distressing world of the concentration camp and the Bomb”, to mirror humanity’s Cold War-era fears. Jackson may even have taken pleasure in the subversive impact of her work, as revealed by Hyman’s statement that she “was always proud that the Union of South Africa banned The Lottery‘, and she felt that they at least understood the story”.
In 1965, Jackson died of heart failure in her sleep, at her home in North Bennington Vermont, at the age of 48.
