More Shirley Jackson Stories (1948)

After "The Intoxicated", the next 5 stories in Shirley Jackson's The Lottery and Other Stories are:

1. The Daemon Lover
2. Like Mother Used to Make
3. Trial by Combat
4. The Villager
5. My Life with R. H. Macy

Each of these is about a lonely person, making bad decisions, while struggling with reality and identity issues. They start out with someone intently preparing for something. At first they seem pretty ordinary. The detail makes you identify with their activity and you begin rooting for them as you begin to notice things aren't quite right. They get progressively unreal, turn creepy, and finally end with some twist to reality or loss of identity.

The psychology is reminiscent of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, and the loneliness is reminiscent of the Beatles's "Eleanor Rigby" and Tom Selleck's Jesse Stone TV movies.

It's not pleasant reading. Even the Macy story, which is supposed to be witty, and is to an extent, but the protagonist's total ignorance of the real world is so bizarre it overwhelms the wit--in my opinion.

I think I'll skip to the last story, "The Lottery", which I last read in school, and then put the book down for a while and read something a little less morbid.

References:
Shirley Jackson. The Lottery and Other Stories. 1948, 2005. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
"Eleanor Rigby". Wikipedia. web 2011.
Jesse Stone: Stone Cold. Dir. Robert Harmon. Perf. Tom Selleck. Brandman Productions, 2005. TV Movie.