Shirley Jackson’s classic novel The Haunting of Hill House is my Halloween read this year (I read her equally chilling novel We Have Always Lived in the Castle last year). Stephen King places The Haunting of Hill House alongside Henry James’ Turn of the Screw as one of the two truly “great” (to his thinking) works of supernatural fiction. Who am I to disagree with the author of Pet Sematary and The Shining, since he knows a thing or two about “bad places?” Two Jackson stories, “The Man in the Woods” and “Paranoia,” were newly published in the New Yorker in the past two years, her first appearances in those pages since the 1940s, and I hope this is some indication that she’s enjoying a renaissance, as she is worthy of serious consideration today.

For many decades, Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” was taught in high school English classes, typically under the rubric (or textbook chapter, if you will) of “Irony.” I don’t know if it is still tought, but, given the way the world continues to turn and burn, it probably ought to be standard (though my personal favorite is “The Summer People,” which still creeps me out twenty years later). E-Verser Andrew sent in this 1969 film of “The Lottery.” ‘Tis the Season . . . of the Witch! So watch.

THE LOTTERY – 1969 from Gonçalo Brito on Vimeo.