Shirley Jackson, "The Lottery"
WARNING! WARNING!
AN EXCRUCIATINGLY BAD POP CULTURE PUN/REFERENCE APPEARS AT THE END OF THIS REVIEW, AND IT�S ONE YOU MAY NOT UNDERSTAND ANYWAY! (If you�re lucky.)
PROCEED WITH CAUTION!!!
So now we get to the first of the suggested female authors. Well, it wasn�t the first suggested, but Mrs. Happy (another employee at the bookstore who probably has more books on her to-read shelf than I do) bought this for me, thereby fucking up my whole system.
And apparently, I�m the only person who has never read this. Alex pointed at the cover as he saw me reading, and quietly noted that it was �about stones.� Two days later, as I spent Easter with my mother, she pointed at the book and asked me why I was reading �that trash.�
The trash, the stones, and the title, in case you were like me and got thrown out of high school before they assigned you to read this book of short stories, refers to the final story in this collection. Despite what my mom says, it was probably the best story in the book.
But short story collections usually don�t appeal to me anyway, and this sure didn�t break my views on the subject. Most short stories, with the exception of Kurt Vonnegut, Richard Adams, and maybe Philip K. Dick, fail to flesh out the components of a story and more often then not I�m wondering what the hell just happened.
It certainly happened with this collection. Out of 26 stories, at least half of them made me say �Whatever� when I finished them. Most of these stories were really nothing more than small vignettes into the lives of some people whom more often than not did something weird and slightly unexpected at the end.
Again, whatever.
But there were some stories that I liked besides the one about the stones. �Come Dance with Me in Ireland,� �The Witch,� �Seven Types of Ambiguity,� and �After You, My Dear Alphonse� all had stories that, while varying in length, fleshed out the characters with enough insight to make the story stand on its own.
And now...
The Larch.
I mean, the bad pop culture reference...
