eightyonekilograms:

iridescentsprout:

the shock ending of the lottery is the equivalent of a jumpscare; like, yes, it accomplishes the goal of making you feel uncomfortable, but there’s much more interesting ways of doing horror than that

This feels like a bit of a Seinfeld is Unfunny effect: in the ~75 years since The Lottery was published, we’ve had so many shocking twists and wholesome villages with a dark secret that The Lottery’s ending is, to the modern pop-culture-immersed reader, both completely predictable and pretty weaksauce. But I don’t think that was true to readers at the time.

Over the years Fallout has been pretty interesting and meta re: whether the incongruously wholesome village in the wasteland is secretly cannibals