The Lottery

An astonishingly good book which takes what we know from stories about the sacrificial victim (Shirley Jackson’s short and shocking story of the same name) and the world of organised bullying in schools (The Chocolate War is being read by one pupil-victim) and presents a new view. The mafia here is not the cold cruelty of the Vigils in Cormier’s novel but a more mundane simulation of evil by the Shadow Council and, instead of the chilling Archie Costello, we have Willis Cass who wants this year’s victim to appreciate his difficulties and the similarities in the way they are friendless. Sally Hanson is the ‘winner’ of the lottery, no one will speak to her for the school year and she must be the agent of the Shadow Council’s whims and schemes. This process is shockingly realistic as one by one her friends ignore her and she is left isolated but this novel relies less on sensation and helplessness in the face of awful controlling violence and more on the gradual earned and learned recovery of damaged individuals. Sally was with her father when he was killed in a car crash and still blames herself; her mother still grieves, her friend Bryden lost his legs in another car crash, there is the autistic Tauni Morrison and a range of others who are usually the butt of the Shadow Council. How Sally comes through, the magical power of music and of relationships is the satisfying stuff of this book and of a writer who understands but refuses to believe in the crushing of the human spirit.