Shirley Jackson is most often associated with the chilling short story "The Lottery". First published in The New Yorker in 1948, it immediately met with an unprecedented public reaction, generating a tremendous amount of mail, almost all of it negative. The story has since been anthologized frequently as well as adapted for the stage and screen. It is now considered an American classic. "The Lottery" did much to generate Jackson's reputation for mastery of the bizarre and the haunting-in The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1966) her husband, Stanley Edgar Hyman, quotes one description of his wife as the "Virginia Werewolf of séance-fiction"- a reputation that she did not always appreciate and that may have contributed to a lack of critical attention to her work. The reputation "The Lottery" established for her, fair or not, never really faded, despite her remarkably varied output: in addition to short stories...