James DeMonaco

Filmmaker, “The Purge” series

I was a 12-year-old boy, in the sixth grade, prone to night terrors. “The Lottery” was a consistent double feature in my nightmares. It wasn’t the violence at the end of the story that deprived me of sleep, it was everything Shirley Jackson didn’t tell us. She never told us where we were; she never told us what year it was; and, most importantly and hauntingly, she never told us why. Why?

My first draft of “The Purge” included a three-page opening narration that explained, in detail, how the Purge came about in American society. We shot this sequence and included it in the first cut of the film. One night, I was startled awake. I had dreamed of “The Lottery” once again, still plagued by the same question — Why? The next day, I cut that opening, eliminating any explanation of the Purge’s origins.

Idra Novey

Author, “Take What You Need”

In Jackson’s description of the boys who know they will be praised for gathering stones without being asked, in the power granted to those most willing to keep the procedure going, I recognized my rural high school’s football team, certain parent voices in the stands. I recognized our mandatory ritual each afternoon — students called upon to lower the flag and fold it into a series of triangles. If any student exhibited the daring of Mrs. Hutchinson, to inquire whether we might be better off trying some other kind of fold, the student was immediately ridiculed or ignored.

Miles Hyman

Graphic novelist, “The Lottery”

I first read “The Lottery” when I was too young to understand it. In subsequent re-readings I became more attuned to my grandmother’s skill at her craft, spellbound by her meticulous, almost obsessive fine-tuning of language. But it was in adapting “The Lottery” as a graphic novel in 2016 that I felt I finally understood the story. This unusual experiment gave me the chance to take apart the original text word by word, putting it back together again in visual form — a sort of Humpty Dumpty of menace, so to speak.

Tananarive Due

Author, “The Wishing Pool and Other Stories”

Looking back, I wonder how “The Lottery” especially might have resonated with me as a young Black girl whose family was integrating a mostly white South Florida neighborhood. We had a few incidents — tomatoes thrown against the house, vandalism to our car — but most days were sunny and bright, like the one described at the opening of Shirley Jackson’s story. I didn’t know that my parents had been so worried about threats against our family that they enlisted white friends from the Unitarian church to sit watch over our house in their cars at night. But maybe, like my mother before me, I’d already learned how horror fiction could express true-life fears I couldn’t let myself think about consciously — like what might happen if an entire community turned against us and started throwing stones.

Danielle Trussoni

Author, “The Puzzle Master”

I was edging toward writing about violence, and I realized that I could go even further.

Stephen Graham Jones

Author, “Don’t Fear the Reaper”

Must have been right around fourth grade, maybe fifth. Little 2A school way out in the West Texas scrub. This would have been right when we stopped having homeroom, with one teacher doing all the subjects, and were now going from class to class, teacher to teacher. It felt so adult. The thing that lodged in me: that everything that’s about to happen — the violence, the gore, the killing — it’s happening in my head, after the story’s over. I could shut the book, but the story kept murmuring.