The Big Read IV: The Lottery and Other Stories -- Shirley Jackson "The Witch" and "The Renegade"

"The Witch":  In which we have either a nice, sweet, possibly confused old man OR a nice old man with a strange sense of humor OR a crazy psycho killer old man.

• La la la, a lady on the train with her children.  A little baby:

She was strapped securely to the seat so she could sit up and look around, and whenever she began to slip slowly sideways the strap caught her and held her halfway until her mother turned around and straightened her again.

and a four-year-old boy:

The few other people in the coach were sitting at the other end of the car; if any of them had occasion to come down the aisle the little boy would look around and say, "Hi," and the stranger would usually say, "Hi," back and sometimes ask the little boy if he were enjoying the train ride, or even tell him he was a fine big fellow.  These comments annoyed the little boy and he would turn irritably back to the window.

• La la la, on the train.  The boy sees a witch outside (or so he says) and then a nice-looking old man comes by and he and the boy spar for a bit and THEN the man tells the boy about HIS little sister:

"I bought her a rocking-horse and a doll and a million lollipops," the man said, "and then I took her and I put my hands around her neck and I pinched her until she was dead."

• AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!

• Actually, I didn't find the guy all that creepy.  If I'd been the mother, well, YEAH, of course I would have, but I thought the focus of the story was on the little boy, and he seemed to be enjoying himself.  But then there's the whole danger-in-very-normal-places thing... I think spooky happenings in everyday places are way scarier than spooky happenings in very obviously spooky places.  Maybe because the spooky is intruding on our world?  Anyway.  I really do like these little no-real-explanation-slice-of-life stories.

"The Renegade":  In which I was just happy that I wasn't Mrs. Walpole.

• I'm glad I don't live in the 1950s:

He said, "Morning," without glancing up and Mrs. Walpole, her mind full of unfinished sentences that began, "Don't you think other people ever have any feelings or--" started patiently to set his breakfast before him.

• And then the phone call:

"The dog," the voice said.  "You'll have to do something about the dog."

A sudden unalterable terror took hold of Mrs. Walpole.  Her morning had gone badly, she had not yet had her coffee, she was faced with an evil situation she had never known before, and now the voice, its tone, its inflection, had managed to frighten Mrs. Walpole with a word like "something."

I thought that was good -- that the vagueness of "something" might be worse than specifics.

• The us vs. them/country vs. city/locals vs. people-from-away mindset is one that I know I suffer from.  I live in an area where the population doubles (literally) in the summer.  So while I sympathize with Mrs. Walpole, I sympathize with the lady on the phone, too.

• Did you notice that the chicken people are named Harris?

• Except for the caller, Mrs. Nash and, obviously, Mrs. Walpole, everyone seems to be enjoying the situation, giving nasty advice and whatnot.  I'm with Mrs. Walpole on this one -- I don't see the humor in it.

• And the kids.  Rather similar to the last story, what with the kids relishing the idea of violence and the mother being understandably sickened.  These last two stories reminded me quite a bit of Ray Bradbury.

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Other reader/bloggers:

Gail at Original Content 
Heidi at Adventures in Multiplicity
Patricia at A Girl Diverged ("The Renegade")

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Previously:

"My Life with R.H. Macy"
"The Villager"
"Like Mother Used to Make" and "Trial By Combat"
"The Intoxicated" and "The Daemon Lover"
The Schedule

Comments

[gailg]

I can't say I really got The Witch. Like I said earlier, a lot of these stories seem like "slice of life," situational pieces rather than traditional short stories in which something happens to characters that changes them. Yeah, I loved the kid and loved the point where the stranger told the boy what he did to his own little sister. But I'm not sure what happened here. And why was it called The Witch?

Then The Renegade--yeah, this struck me as very much us vs them/city folk vs. rural folk. And, yeah, I come from people who would have said, "Shoot the damn dog" and wondered what her problem was. But I don't think this story is about the dog at all, it's about someone unwillingly losing herself in what she sees as a totally different culture. You'll recall that at the end of the story, her kids are going over to the other side.

I'm not sure at what point Jackson wrote this story or what inspired it. I have been to the town she was living in as a faculty wife. (Though not for many years.) I think of it as being a relatively sophisticated, if small, place. In fact, I was with some old family friends from Vermont last week and asked their impression of the place, even back forty years ago. They said, "Money." (There is an expensive, private college there.) So I'm reading this thing and thinking, Just how rural were the people she had to deal with?

However, I skimmed this Salon article (I'd read it back when it was published), and it claims that she did suffer from anti-Semitism and anti-intellectualism when she was living in Vermont, and she may have had conflicts in town for other reasons.

[Leila]

I don't know if there was much to get in "The Witch". I assumed that it referred to the old man, but heck, who knows? Maybe it referred to the little boy.

If anyone's reading these comments and wants to read the story, it's available here.

One of the many things I'm enjoying about the stories is that the writing feels pretty spare, but somehow I'm still getting a really clear picture in my head of the characters and the events. Like little short films.

No, I don't think it was about the dog. She was another character who was alone. The only person it seemed she even had a vague connection with was the lady next door. And that was only because the lady was semi-sympathetic. I do think that the people who were giving her the advice were kind of revelling in it because they were doing the "Let's screw with the lady who's from away" thing. I admit that I always got a kick out of driving friends from away by the country store during deer season when the deer were being weighed out front...

I hadn't thought about her kids going over to the other side, being assimilated into the country culture. That works.

I did think it was interesting, though, that both stories featured mothers who were kind of scared by the vision of their kids enjoying the idea of violence.

It made me wonder if the stories in this section would have a theme, the way that a bunch of the stories in the previous section had the Home=Identity (I think it was Heidi who came up with that?) theme...

I think I'm going to try and track a copy of this down. I've always been interested in Shirley Jackson -- reading this, though, has spurred me to actually do something about it!

[gailg]

I've never read that and definitely should. If only I had time, I would read her books about her family, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. I may have read them when I was a teenager, but the concept is similar to Please Don't Eat the Daisies, and I just can't be sure of what I've read and what I haven't.

[Heidi]

Thanks, Gail for that Salon article. I look forward to reading it.

Leila, I was playing around with the idea of the Harris character always being a daemon, and as such acts as the catalyst for diabolical change. So I wondered if the cigar-smoking gentleman was the 'Harris' character and thus the witch. Perhaps this is related to the theme you're looking for...a particular moment switches the story to a darker track.

I look forward to your review once you read "Private Demons"