According to her publisher's blurb, Shirley Jackson, whose recent New Yorker stories have been grouped in "The Lottery," is a practicing amateur witch. This is surprisingly easy to believe. For some of her stories manage to conjure up black magic that would have been extremely self-satisfying to any of Miss Jackson's late Salem forerunners.

Most of the stories fit what people like to call the New Yorker pattern: sharp photographic action--glaringly-lit scenes into which the reader is lowered like a sound-stage camera on its boom, allowed to look on for a few minutes, and then abruptly lifted out again--terse dialogue and quick images. The people in the stories are finely brushed-in, and Miss Jackson knows how to use children to mirror the inadequacies of her adults. But these features are neither necessarily good in themselves nor Miss Jackson's particular property (though she works very well with them.) It is the title story, far from her usual pattern, which makes "The Lottery" an exceptional book.

This story should bother you. It worried other people enough so that they sent off to the New Yorker a record bundle of letters when the story first appeared last summer. The plot is an inordinately simple one, set in a narrow New England town; revealing it would tip one of the most persistently puzzling stories that has turned up in quite a while. Miss Jackson nimbly precipitates a commonplace situation into quiet mystery, then active horror. "The Lottery" is an allegory, and a fine one: it cuts too close to the heart of people and their customs to be anything much else. You can also take it as a straight dose of hair-trigger shock, if you'd rather. The story does quite as well either way and makes Miss Jackson's book worth reading.