Back when I used to buy a lot of music (no longer, thanks to digital music services) I would sometimes purchase an album because of a hit single I enjoyed by the performer in question. That was always a risky proposition, because some of those albums turned out to have one great song (the hit single), a couple of passable tracks, and a lot of dreck. Unfortunately, that’s the model that comes to mind when my thoughts turn to The Lottery and Other Stories. You have “the hit,” (“The Lottery,” a deserved classic) a few worthwhile stories (more on those in a moment), and a lot of stories I struggled to finish. I really wanted to like this collection–after all, I love Shirley Jackson–but I really, really didn’t.

I think there are three reasons for this. The first is my own reading preferences and expectations about the collection. I admit I am much more forgiving of creative work that has fantastic elements or an aura of menace (I’m also a sucker for mysteries of all kinds). I am more willing to overlook stylistic flaws or even plot imperfections in a story if something weird or mysterious is going on. I knew from reviews of the collection that most of the stories were not horror or suspense stories, but I thought perhaps the reviews overstated things. They did not. There are twenty-five stories in this collection. “The Lottery” is the only out-and-out horror story; three more stories describe disintegrating psychological states that could be associated with horror. That’s it. Everything else is a Saturday Evening Post/New Yorker slice of life, although Jackson’s characters may be a bit more eccentric than your standard New Yorker protagonist was at the time (most of these stories were published in the 1940’s). I couldn’t help but be disappointed. I’ve always considered myself to have cosmopolitan tastes (I frequently enjoy The New Yorker fiction section, for instance), but here I am getting irritated because Shirley Jackson won’t write only weird stuff, dammit. I imagine many writers who enjoy writing across genre struggle with myopic attitudes like mine, and I think it’s more difficult to quickly establish a following if your creative work drifts across genres on a regular basis. Readers frequently want “the same, only different”–as Lawrence Block called it–and they are less enthusiastic about genres or stories that aren’t in their wheelhouse. Even me, although I’m working on it. Honest.

The second reason I didn’t care much for this collection was my impression that menace-free mimetic fiction is not Jackson’s strong suit. Besides “The Lottery,” my favorite stories in this collection had some relationship to the uncanny. “The Demon Lover” and “Pillar of Salt” both have the feel of waking nightmares, even though nothing explicitly fantastic is going on. In “The Demon Lover” a woman cannot find her husband-to-be on her wedding day. Jackson masterfully ratchets up the tension, from mild unease to panic, as we wonder if this woman is either crazy or the victim of a cruel ruse. “Pillar of Salt” describes a young woman’s journey to New York City for a vacation. The woman becomes increasingly apprehensive of the city and its inhabitants, until she is so paralysed with fear that she cannot cross the street. Like “The Lottery,” both of these stories start with almost no trace of oddness, then slowly move towards heightened states of emotion. I want to copy this technique in my own work, and will assuredly use these stories as a reference.

It’s quite disappointing then, that so many of the other stories in this collection don’t really go anywhere. A young girl doesn’t want to admit in front of a boy her age that she writes poetry. A lady feels uneasy around her brash housekeeper. A literary agent tries to keep her business partner (and boyfriend) from hiring a buxom secretary. And so on. Certain themes keep popping up–ethnic and racial prejudice, the violation of social boundaries–but everything is painted in very broad strokes, which makes them much less interesting to me. A few are almost devoid of narrative tension–they start, they meander for a bit, they end. I enjoy much mimetic fiction (I love Raymond Carver and Denis Johnson, for instance), but these stories left me cold.

The final reason I didn’t care for this collection? These stories are not representative of Shirley Jackson’s best work. Most of these stories were written early in Jackson’s career, and like most writers, she got better. It is not surprising that the stories I enjoyed most in this collection were the last ones written. Much of the work we celebrate Jackson for– especially The Haunting of Hill House and  We Have Always Lived in the Castle— were many years from publication when this collection was released. Here, Jackson was still perfecting the techniques that would serve her so well in her longer works (and in her short story “The Summer People,” one of my personal favorites). It is comforting to know that Jackson didn’t emerge fully-formed as a writer, that she had a lot of growing to do when this collection was published. However, it makes these stories more than a little uneven.

After spending all this time bashing The Lottery and Other Stories,I must admit: I’m glad I read it. I was able to see how Jackson piles on similar environmental descriptors (images of city decay, in “Pillar of Salt”) to create an almost surreal atmosphere. I was able to watch Jackson use extraordinary subtlety (in “Seven Types of Ambiguity,” probably the only subtle mimetic story here) to effectively limn character. And, I got to re-read “The Lottery.” That’s enough for me.