1st Avenue

Still as good as ever and each story is still as chilling as when I first read it, especially “The Lottery.” I’ve read this short story collection from cover to cover at least five times and reread individual stories within this collection countless times, and they still get to me every time I come back to them.

Jackson has a way of turning every day life events into something memorable at the end of the story. Although many of these stories aren’t quite as haunting as “The Lottery,” they’re disturbing in their own rights.

Jackson also has a way of turning mundane situations into something chilling, and that’s what I love most about the stories in this collection. They’re my favorite for one reason and one reason only: they can get to you when you least expect it. A story can start out as calm and dull as any other story about every day life in middle America, but then somewhere along, the narration takes a quick turn and the mundane becomes disorienting. That’s when the fun really begins.

From experience, I find Jackson’s short stories more interesting than her full-length novels because her psychological turns in narration work better in short form.