Shirley Jackson’s 1948 short story “The Lottery” is a well-known cautionary tale about the dangers of blindly following tradition, about conformity, and about an innate human violence that needs to be appeased. (The Purge franchise clearly picked up on Jackson’s vision of the efficacy of regular cathartic releases of violence.)
In Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and its film adaptations, however much tradition, conformity, or violence may be pressuring individuals to act, it is clear that it is indeed humans who are acting. At the end of the story, after the sacrificial victim has picked her paper with the black dot, we see characters deliberately pick up stones from the pile gathered in the town center. “Mrs. Delacroix selected a stone so large she had to pick it up with both hands.” The town’s children had already taken their stones, and “someone gave little Davy Hutchinson,” the victim’s son, “a few pebbles.” The infamous last line of the story, “and then they were upon her,” makes it clear that the characters act –with purpose and intention. Jackson’s story is a humanist story: it doesn’t necessarily elaborate the more attractive parts of human nature, but we see human free will and human choice in action.
The villagers gather stones in the 1969 adaptation, The Lottery, directed by Larry Yust
Stephen King’s “Rainy Season,” published in 1992 (and now to be found in the 1993 collection, Nightmares and Dreamscapes) is an intriguing rewriting of “The Lottery.” It’s about a couple—Elise and John Graham—who arrive in the village of Willow, Maine, to spend the summer. They are a little nonplussed when their initial encounters with the local residents involve warnings to stay away from town for the night, to spend the night in a motel. When Elise and John make it clear they’re going to do no such thing, the locals—Henry Eden and Laura Stanton—get a bit more specific and tell the Grahams that “it’s the rainy season here tonight.” Somewhat reluctantly giving up more details, Henry and Laura tells the Grahams that every seven years in Willow, on June seventeenth, it rains toads.
You can find King’s “Rainy Season” in Nightmares and Dreamscapes here:
Not surprisingly, Elise and John think this has to be some sort of unfriendly joke. Indeed, John wonders if they might not be in trouble from the villagers –and he “found himself thinking of Shirley Jackson’s short story, ‘The Lottery’ for the first time since he’d read it in junior high school” (p. 459). As it turned out, the Grahams really should have listed to Henry and Laura.
What King does in this story that serves as such an effective rewriting of “The Lottery” is that he mostly takes things out of the hands of the human characters. Certainly, Laura and Henry try to warn the Grahams away, as they do every seven years. But, as is always the case, the sacrificial couple doesn’t heed their warning; they stay, and they die.
You can find Jackson’s “The Lottery” here:
Indeed, King makes it clear that something—some nonhuman force—is at work in the world of “Rainy Season” (and our own world), and that something exceeds human choice and free will. A look at his language makes this clear. Unlike Jackson’s very clear use of personal pronouns—he, she, they—King liberally deploys the impersonal “it.” As Laura says to the Grahams, “You see, folks, it rains toads here in Willow every seven years.” And, “You see, it doesn’t just sprinkle toads. It pours” (458-9). And, “it’s part of the ritual. . . . “Ayuh. It’s the ritual” (460). And, later, after the bloody ritual is over, Laura repeats, “It’s the ritual” (477).
Even as Laura reassures Henry that they did all they could to warn the Grahams away—and even as she say the Grahams chose to stay, as they always did—the very idea that the Grahams “chose” to stay is undercut by the fact that “They always decide to stay” (477). If the couple always stays, despite being warned, do they actually have any choice?
King ends by writing that the ritual is something Henry “could control no more than he could control the tides or the phases of the moon” (479). The ritual—not least because it includes toads—seems part of nature, an uncontrollable part of nature. If Jackson’s story, then, places us firmly in the realm of human action, of the consequences of human choice, King puts us in a larger world of nature in which humans have no choice. In this world “it” reigns.
Both Jackson’s and King’s story is a horror story, but they are very different kind of horror stories and the horror tradition has certainly played on both. “The Lottery” shows the horrors of which humans are capable. “Rainy Season” shows the horrors to which humans are subject, despite themselves, against their will. Indeed, the horror tradition is full of incarnations of the “It” that maims and kills—the inexplicable, ineffable, unstoppable nonhuman force.
I have also written about the adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Raft” in Creepshow 2 in relation to hyperobjects and the agency of things.
You can watch the short film adaptation of The Lottery here, directed by Larry Yust in 1969 for Encyclopedia Britannica.
