The world might be talking about The Haunting of Hill House now, but for many years it was not Jackson’s best-known work. That honour went instead to The Lottery, a short story published in The New Yorker in 1948.

Like Hill House, The Lottery has a horrifying premise that taps into the darkness of human psychology. In a small New England village, locals ceremonially stone one of their own to death every harvest season. The unlucky villager is chosen by a lottery system, where receiving a slip with a black spot means you’ve been chosen as the ritual sacrifice.

Published just a few years after the end of the Second World War, a period when many Americans wanted their fiction to be uplifting and optimistic, The Lottery sparked an immediate backlash. Both Jackson and The New Yorker received hate mail, and several of the magazine’s readers announced that they were cancelling their subscriptions. In a 1960 lecture, Jackson recalled receiving “300-odd letters” the summer after The Lottery was published, of which just 13 “spoke kindly to me – and they were mostly from friends”.

Yet a collection of Jackson’s short fiction, titled and including The Lottery, was hugely commercially successful when it was released in 1949. Today, the story is considered a classic: still taught in secondary schools in the US, it has been adapted for TV, film and radio, and its influence is apparent in macabre modern entertainment like The Hunger Games. Another one of Jackson’s novels, 1962’s gothic mystery We Have Always Lived in the Castle, can be seen as the centre of the Venn diagram of The Lottery and The Haunting of Hill House, for its exploration of small-town twistedness and female psychology.

The Haunting of Hill House’s author Shirley Jackson was an overlooked genius