She is best known for her dystopian short story, 'The Lottery' (1948), which suggests there is a deeply unsettling underside to bucolic, smalltown America. She has influenced such writers as Stephen King, Nigel Kneale, and Richard Matheson. A popular writer in her time, her work has received increasing attention from literary critics in recent years. Shirley Jackson was an influential American author. 'Shirley Jackson is unparalleled as a leader in the field of beautifully written, quiet, cumulative shudders'. 'The world of Shirley Jackson is eerie and unforgettable.It is a place where things are not what they seem even on a morning that is sunny and clear there is always the threat of darkness looming, of things taking a turn for the worse'. Shirley Jackson died in her sleep at the age of 48. Her first novel, The Road Through the Wall, was published in the same year and was followed by five Hangsaman, The Bird's Nest, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, widely seen as her masterpiece. When her short story The Lottery was first published in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were so horrified they sent her hate mail it has since become one of the greatest American stories of all time. Shirley Jackson was born in California in 1916. Portraying insanity, disturbing encounters, troubling children and a sinister lottery, Shirley Jackson's work has an unmatched power to unnerve and unsettle. It seemed to have had its picture taken without her it was the important creature which must be recorded and examined and gratified she was only its unwilling vehicle.' The creeping unease of lives squandered and the bloody glee of lives lost is chillingly captured in these five tales of casual cruelty by a master of the short story. 'Her tooth, which had brought her here unerringly, seemed now the only part of her to have any identity.

'Her stories are among the most terrifying ever written'. Including her iconic tale The Lottery, The Tooth brings together a short selection of Shirley Jackson's most sinister stories.

The Tooth by Shirley Jackson