Look, there's no getting round it. "The Lottery" is a five star short story if ever there was one. It's absolutely excellent, and one of my favourites. That said, while the other stories in this collection are good - often very good - there's nothing else that stands up with it for sheer punchy quality. The better stories in here, stories like "Flower Garden" and "Of Course" and "Men with Their Big Shoes", are stories of petty creeping unease more than anything else. They're slow moving and you can see the end coming, very clearly, and while you hope the characters will find it within themselves to subvert that expected end, the fact is that in most cases they just don't have the gumption or the self-awareness or the decency to avoid it. Oh, they'll tell you they're decent people, I'm sure, and feel absolutely truthful as they do, but there's nothing idealised about them. They're petty in every sense of the word.

There's something genuinely fascinating about that, about the sheer mild everyday grubbiness that Jackson describes. She's got a beautiful prose style, that's for sure, and her stories are always horribly observant. From the title, however, I was expecting more actual horror and not, you know, irritations between neighbours and the hired help. "The Lottery" is flat out horror, but I think the rest of this falls more into general fiction. And while it's undoubtedly (and painfully) accomplished fiction, it's the title story that sticks most to the mind, and I think that's probably true for every reader.