A genuinely chilling, even scary, ghost story, is not something you read that often. Or I don’t, these days, at least.

Combine that with compelling characters, comedy, and tragedy, and you’ve got kind of a small masterpiece.

I only say “small” because it’s quite short. I only know Jackson from a film version of “The Lottery” that they used to show us in school. I’m not sure why they showed us it, exactly, because we didn’t study it in English, and as far as I recall we didn’t discuss it. I think maybe it was a sort of treat, and the school only had a few films, that it showed repeatedly. These were actual films, I should add. Played on a projector, watched on a screen.

Anyway Jackson’s story always stuck with me, and now this one joins it.