Shirley Jackson's name is most often associated in readers' minds with the haunting short story "The Lottery," which was originally published in 1948 and has since become a frequently anthologized American classic. To those familiar with the rest of Jackson's fiction, her stories and novels have earned her a reputation as a "literary sorceress," a writer with a peculiar talent for the bizarre, a creator of psychological thrillers, an adroit master of effect and suspense. In spite of her popularity, however, her work has received little critical attention. Jackson's remarkable versatility may account partly for the silence. In her lifetime she published novels, short stories, plays, children's books, television scripts, and humorous sketches of domestic life--all of which prevented her easy classification.

Above all Jackson is a storyteller; her stories aim to entertain. Yet the entertainment value of her fiction masks a pessimistic view of human nature; social criticism...