The Lottery

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

1. What do you know about the horror genre? Make a list of horror stories that you have read or heard. Explain what makes these stories scary.

Teaching Suggestion: While “The Lottery” might not be a traditional horror story as students may think of them, the thematic motifs of The Cruelty of Friends and Family and Small Towns and Small Minds are certainly horrifying. This question helps students consider what makes a story scary so they are ready to identify similar elements in “The Lottery.” Alternatively, students can list horror movies. Try to push students beyond “jump scares” and have them consider how tension builds in a horror film.

• “The Psychology Behind Why We Love (or Hate) Horror” by Haiyang Yang and Kuangjie Zhang of the Harvard Business Review provides insights into what happens to the audience in a horror story. 
• “Cormac McCarthy's The Road May Have the Scariest Passage in All of Literature” by Joe Fassler not only discusses a terrifying scene from The Road by Cormac McCarthy but also describes what makes it so horrifying.