When Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” was published in The New Yorker magazine June 26, 1948, the reader response was sensational. A tale chronicling the systematic stoning of a townswoman in a rural town by means of a lottery, the public’s reaction to the story is, to this day, unprecedented in the long and storied history of The New Yorker.

Readers cancelled their memberships. Furious phone calls clogged the magazine’s phone lines. The most productive means of dissent, however, came from letters, as Jackson received 10 to 12 letters a day demanding an explanation for the story’s violent climax.

In Come Away with Me, Jackson recalled the hate mail: “It had simply never occurred to me that these millions and millions of people might be so far from being uplifted that they would sit down and write me letters I was downright scared to open; of the three-hundred-odd letters that I received that summer I can count only thirteen that spoke kindly to me, and they were mostly from friends.”

Even Jackson’s mother disproved of the story. “Dad and I did not care at all for your story in The New Yorker,” she said. “It does seem, dear, that this gloomy kind of story is what all you young people think about these days. Why don’t you write something to cheer people up?”

Reading “The Lottery” today, these criticisms seems shallow, albeit understandable. While “The Lottery” stands today as an impeccably written, beautifully controlled story, it is, at the same time, a horrifying, uncomfortable parable of violence, one that still shocks over 60 years after the publishing date.

“The Lottery” is a marvel of composition. Opening the story with a description of a perfect June summers day, Jackson writes, “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.” What a lovely image! The story continues on this harmless trajectory, describing the congenial, amiable relationships among the townsfolk, the comradery amongst the children, and even the joking, half-serious tone of the participants as they begin the actual lottery.

Slowly, but surely, the story builds, creating an uncomfortable tension in the most simplistic fashion—characters. The characters and dialogue, rather than Jackson’s narrative, begins to second-guess the nature of the lottery.

This restraint allows the horror of the story’s final act to speak without interference.

This incredible brevity, (the story is a mere six pages), only lends more shock to the story’s final image of a desperate, doomed Tessie Hutchinson being enveloped by her fellow townsfolk, stones in hand, ready to brutally end her life.

On first reading, the climax of “The Lottery” works as pure shock, a whiplash of a development that leaves the reader eyes widened, jaw dropped, and with an unsettling sensation of euphoria slithering up the spine.

Johnnie Wilcox, a professor of English at Ohio University, said the shock of the story succeeds like it does because of the story’s setting in a supposedly normal agrarian society.

“What you see is a society that seemingly is organized, and thoughtful, and harkens back to traditional values even for the time period,” Wilcox said. “And I think that ultimately what it reveals is that the system is … actually the orchestration of a channeled, civilized violence.”

At the same time, however, “The Lottery” bears an uncomfortable stigma of fate.

“The narrative itself,” Wilcox said, “seems to sort of suggest, ‘well, (Hutchinson) was randomly chosen,’ but if you look more carefully it seems that almost as if the whole story hints that … Tessie Hutchinson was chosen somehow more than randomly.”

So the story’s premise — that a member of a community must violently perish for the good of the commonwealth — is a difficult thesis to accept, rendering the original reader-protests to the story in 1948 understandable.

A later admission by Jackson, though, regarding the contents of the protests, casts them in a different light.

Jackson said: “The general tone of the early letters, however, was a kind of wide-eyed, shocked innocence. People at first were not so much concerned with what the story meant; what they wanted to know was where these lotteries were held, and whether they could go there and watch.”

“The Lottery,” therefore, on an instinctual level, appeals to our uncomfortable fascination with violence, something anyone who has witnessed a car crash can attest to.

Realistically, our relationship with violence is a direct result of our evolutionary ancestry. Humans are civilized animals, living and functioning in an organized society and defying the patterns of natural selection; furthermore, due to our sophistication and intelligence, we seem entirely justified in condemning brutal acts of violence…until stories like “The Lottery” surface and challenge our moral foundations.

Our ancestors — the very organisms we evolved from and replaced by natural selection — were undoubtedly violent creatures, and our current species is uncomfortable with this premise. Therefore, it seems natural that we would disregard a story like “The Lottery” that hits so close to home.

“The Lottery” caused a sensation when it was published, and in remarking on the story’s troubled reception, a certain question beckons with ceaseless fervor: is such a thing possible today? Would “The Lottery” — if it were published in 2009 — cause the same kind of reaction?

In short, NO.

The reason, however, is not because of sinking circulation. Magazines, especially ones featuring scantily clad women, have been defying the digital revolution ever so slightly. Whereas newspaper circulation is dwindling to a comatose level, magazines like Maxim still reach 2.5 million people.

While The New Yorker’s circulation is a tad lower (hovering around 1,062,000), it still reaches a respectable number of people with stunning array of content; furthermore, The New Yorker has proven time and again its essential standing in the news world, most recently as the outlet that broke the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal in 2004.

Also, the magazine still has the ability to shock. Just last year, a cover of a New Yorker issue, featuring a cartoon of a gun-toting, fist-pounding, communist-branding Barack and Michelle Obama (an satire of the right-wing media attacks that were being leveled at the couple) created a media fire blitz, forcing statements of defense from the magazine’s editor and cartoonist.

Yet, instances such as this—cases of the media stepping beyond the typical boundaries of political correctness—will always shock, whether it be broadcast by Rush Limbaugh, televised by CNN, or printed by The New York Times.

The ability of a piece of fiction to shock, at least at the level of “The Lottery,” seems to have reached its fruition, especially regarding stories of violence amidst a culture as violence-saturated as our own.

That is not to detract, in any way, from the power and awe that “The Lottery” inspires, but an admirable shock is far different from outrage, and story’s with the subtlety and restraint of “The Lottery” pale in comparison to the latest horror film schlock from Lionsgate Films.

So in the era of Saw V does “The Lottery” shock? We’ll have to wait and see, but our cultural addiction to torture porn says otherwise.