Quick answer
The closest matches are The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1973 story of a city whose happiness depends on one suffering child, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson’s own 1962 novel about a village turning on two sisters, and The Hunger Games, a novel built around a public draw. Further down: a lottery in Borges’s Babylon and a midnight forest meeting in Puritan Salem.
8 books to read after The Lottery
The Ones Who Walk Away from OmelasClosest match
The city of Omelas is joyful, and everyone in it knows its happiness depends on one child kept in misery in a basement. Most accept the bargain; a few walk away and never come back. It won the 1974 Hugo Award. It asks the same question as Jackson’s village, then pushes further: what about the people who refuse, and is leaving enough?
We Have Always Lived in the CastleClosest match
Eighteen-year-old Merricat Blackwood lives with her sister Constance and Uncle Julian, six years after most of their family died of arsenic at dinner. Constance was acquitted, but the villagers shun them, and after a fire they ransack the house. Jackson returns to the village crowd, this time seen from inside the house of the people it has chosen to hate.
The Hunger Games
In Panem, every district must send two young people, picked by public draw at a ceremony called the reaping, to fight to the death in a televised arena. Katniss Everdeen volunteers in place of her younger sister. That opening reaping is a direct descendant of Jackson’s draw: names on slips, a gathered crowd, a ritual nobody can refuse.
The Lottery in Babylon
In a mythical Babylon, a lottery that began with paid tickets and cash prizes slowly adds punishments, becomes compulsory, and is run by a secretive Company some doubt even exists. Collected in Ficciones, and written seven years before Jackson’s story. A short, strange piece imagining a whole society built around a draw whose rules nobody questions.
Young Goodman Brown
In Puritan Salem Village, a young man leaves his wife, Faith, for an errand in the forest and finds his respectable neighbours gathered at a midnight ceremony. He returns unsure whether he dreamt it, and distrusts everyone for the rest of his life. More than a century before Jackson, it shows an ordinary New England community with something dark under the surface.
Battle Royale
In an alternate, authoritarian Japan, a class of junior high students is taken to a remote island and forced to kill one another until one survives. It reached the final round of a Japanese horror award but was rejected for its content. Like The Lottery, it turns a state-run selection into a regular ritual that ordinary citizens accept as part of life.
Never Let Me Go
Kathy H., a 31-year-old carer, looks back on her childhood at Hailsham, an English boarding school. She and her friends are clones, raised to donate their organs as adults. Shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize. Like Jackson’s villagers, its characters accept a system that sacrifices some people for others, and almost no one rebels. Quiet, and devastating.
Children of the Corn
A quarrelling couple driving through Nebraska stop in Gatlin and find it run by children who worship a god in the cornfields and kill anyone who reaches adulthood. Collected in Night Shift. It shares Jackson’s pairing of a farming town, a harvest and a killing done as religious duty, with King turning the dread all the way up.
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