The Lottery
Shirley Jackson(1948)
Extract
The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day.
The morning of June 27th is clear and warm, the flowers are blooming, and the children of a small village are gathering stones while their parents assemble in the square for the annual drawing. Shirley Jackson published this story in The New Yorker in 1948, and it generated more mail than anything the magazine had printed, most of it furious, because it touched something readers did not want examined. The ritual is described with the flat, procedural tone of a town meeting, and its horror derives entirely from the ordinariness of the participants, good neighbours who chat about planting and taxes before selecting the person they will kill. Cruelty does not require malice, only tradition, and the most terrifying sentence is spoken calmly.
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O'Connor springs the same trap of sudden violence in an ordinary setting, but adds the grace note Jackson withholds.
Golding takes Jackson's insight and gives it an island and two hundred pages to prove that civilisation is a habit we can break.
Le Guin builds the same moral horror into three pages, but lets some people refuse to participate.