4.0

"The Lottery" is one of the greatest horror shorts ever written - I think I've given it five stars elsewhere on this site - and this is an excellent adaptation of it. It lacks Jackson's exceptional prose, including snippets of it but basically being very sparse in text, and relies instead on lovely artwork, shot through with a bucolic tinge that so successfully (in the graphic novel as in the short story) undercuts the sheer horror of what these people are doing. I was going to say the colours shade darker as the story goes along, but I've just rechecked the book right in front of me and they don't. I think in a way that makes it even creepier... the blues, reds, yellows and so on are consistently cheerful, and it's actually the opening, set in very early morning, that's darkest in its shades. And really, that's very clever and fits right in with the text.