Read For Free The Lottery And Other Stories Engineered By Shirley Jackson Ready In Hardcover

is a great collection of short stories from Shirley Jackson, Looking at some reviews, I think some people have heard Stephen King cite Jackson as one of his favourite authors and gone into this collection expecting it to be full of horror stories.
This is isnt the case, Jackson writes well in many different genres and this collection displays her versatility, I enjoyed this book a great deal, Individual story ratings listed below,

. 'The Intoxicated'stars
. 'The Demon Lover'.stars
. Like Mother Used to Make'stars
, Trial By Combatstars
, The Villagerstars
. 'My Life With R. H. Macy'stars
. 'The Witch'stars
. 'The Renegade'.stars
. 'After You, My Dear Alphonse',stars
. 'Charles'.stars
. 'Afternoon in Linen'stars
, Flower Gardenstars
. Dorothy and My Grandmother and the Sailorsstars
, Colloquystars
. Elizabeth.stars
. A Fine Old Firm.stars
. The Dummystars
. Seven Types of Ambiguitystars
, Come Dance With Me in Ireland,stars
. Of Course.stars
. Pillar of Salt.stars
. Men With Their Big Shoesstars
, The Toothstars
. Got a Letter from Jimmy,stars
. The Lotterystars

Overallstars

My next book: sitelinkMarvel Masterworks: Deathlok vol, My membership to the Gothic Appreciation Society has been revoked, I have been disowned by all my Jacksonloving book friends, I'm sorry, but I just could not find it in me to love this one,

The Lottery and Other Stories is, surprisingly, I know, a collection of Jackson's short tales, I have previously read a portion of her Dark Tales anthology before casting it aside but I was so eager to give more of her renowned work a go, given that The Haunting of Hill House is my favourite ever horrors.


I so wanted to love this one! I really did! Unfortunately, it affected me in precisely the same way as her last anthology, Every story began as compulsively readable as the last and I became repeatedly sure that THIS ONE was going to be the winner but then every story stuttered to a close without me ever being aware of what the actual point was.
I am undoubtedly missing the literary merit or overlooking the true moral or meaning hidden between the lines, however, reading them proved increasingly frustrating when I failed to grasp the most basic of reason for their creation.


There were a handful of stories I loved, The Lottery being one of them, but most were onestar failures for me, I'm still interested in reading more of Jackson's fulllength work, but will give her shorter creations a miss, from now on, I am not persuaded any of these qualify as horror, Good enough stories, readable, lukewarm writing, not much more, !!!BEWARE of SPOILERS AHEAD!!!!

There's this story about some weird guy telling a young neurotical kid with an even younger sister gruesome tales about his own hypothetical sister.
The mother chases him away,

There's a story about a woman running around looking for her fiance and asking a bunch of random geezers about him, It's painstakingly described how she's overand how it's disadvantageing her to no end and how difficult it is to look presentable at this ripe old age, . . eyeroll We get a view of herpocketbooks dilemma,dress dilemma, all kinds of dillemas of this kind, We even get a view of her fantasy of how she would talk to the police, trying to explain to them that she has a right to a fiance because she's not just this shabby body/face at her ripe old age of! eyeroll but that there's also something beneath the surface that makes her worthy of this great honour.
eyeroll

There's another story about a dancer become secretary who tries to buy secondhand furniture and pretends for a bit she's the one selling it to another customer.


The Lottery, of course, So, the winner gets stoned by their neighbours young kids included, once per year,

Another story is about a girl talking to a grownup about the approaching end of the world, the said grownup gets his panties in a twist about it.


Yet another story is about Laurie telling stories about Charlie I hope I'm not mistaken about the names, L. goes to a kindergarten and comes home regaling everyone with stories about a wilder kid in there, C, These stories 'become an institution' with the family who start calling anything wild or unfortunate or nasty 'a Charlie', Then, after ages, they learn that there's no Charlie and that it was likely/maybe L, doing all the acting up and then referring to himself in thed person and another name, Taudry Maybe. I liked this one for its weirdness but then again, it's not too unusual a situation, And not a horror, definitely, Kids and grownups have been known to do far more horrible stuff than misbehaving in a kindergarten and then trying to make up an alter ego,

Another one is about marines and a whole flock of females of a family who think marines are dirty or deranged or are gonna jump them all on sight or something.
And yes, it's boring.

Another story is about an Afroamerican kid invited to dinner to a White family and the mother of the family being very obtuse about his life circumstances.
She's very determined to have her foot in her mouse for the duration of the story, And she succeeds in that with flying colours,

Actually, all over there are lots of women portrayed in here who are shown how they are overand how it's difficult to be overcompared to being over.
All these women live either for men or for kids or for something just behind the horizon, They don't do things just for themselves, And it's all damn tiresome and it might have been a social horror or writing horror or boredoutofmymind horror

but not horrorhorror, I hope the author was trying to achive some kind of social satire or irony and was illustrating all this shit for the purpose of showing the reader just how bothersome these attitudes can get.
Or else, these stories would be worthless altogether,

And bothersome this whole stuff is! Seriously, men, meeting such women, how did they not manage to run really fast away so as not to immediately become the center of someone else's universe Is it even pleasant for anyone when the people's worlds are so very much skewed I wouldn't want to be in any society where any social group is obliged to revolve around the interest of any other social group.
I think both would be incredibly boring,

Mind it, these stories might have been groundbreaking in their time including the miracle of a woman, no, A WOMAN putting her pen to paper and getting some results recognisable as writing! but at this time, today, these are more of a jawbreakingfromyawning kind.
Mildly interesting. Only mildly. The Lottery is a brilliant, iconic story, and most of us read it as young people and therefore it along with the innocently laughing Bobby, collecting stones which will soon become weapons was permanently seared in our brains.


The rest of these stories, however, were unfamiliar to me, I wasn't surprised at how engaging they were, how easily I was drawn in, I was a little surprised at how some of them petered, though, leaving the stories hacked off halfway, unresolved, as though the author had lost interest or realized there wasn't much more to do.


Most of the stories have a very strong female point of view, A female who is chained to her gender a mother, a housewife, and not a very attractive one, and a disillusioned one, one that is probably smoking, and aching for something more.
The jilted fiancée, the woman mistaken for the lady of the house, the woman who worked at Macy's just for one day,

Sometimes the stories feature men, like one who talks with a teenage girl at a party and is disturbed by her insights on the bad state of the world, or the one who recounts to a boy on a train that he chopped up his sister into pieces and fed her head to a lion.


There's often something quite unknown slithering through these pages, Anything could happen, like in a Flannery O'Connor story, I know I'll return to this collection again, and find something hidden that I didn't see on the first pass,

As I mentioned, not all the stories are strong, but they all are sewn together with the same deft, nicotine stained fingers, and those fingers beckon, ominously.


It ends with The Lottery, the story Jackson was meant to write, the story that drew me to the collection in the first place.
"It isn't fair, it isn't right," her character famously declares, and I turn that final page, in full agreement, and admiration, .