Jackson Five: Some Shirley Jackson stories that work, and others that don't

Read a few (5?) more stories in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery and Other Stoires," and it's quite a mix. The first section are mostly stories of young, rather lonely people living in New York - despite their sometimes unusual plot mechanism they are essentially sad social portraits - a typical example being the story about a woman who comes to NY to be a dancer, obviously will never make it in the arts, she goes to look at some furniture for sale in a Greenwich Village apartment, someone calls and believes she lives in the apartment, she plays along with it, for a while. We sense the sadness and isolation of thee people - a type that doesn't exist any longer, not in the same way, as NYC today is so far out of the price range of so many young people - but I find the stories a little disappointing, Jackson unwilling or unable to push them to their extremes. One story of a woman who suspects an elderly resident of her rooming house of petty theft - and she snoops in the woman's room and finds her possessions that - and then doesn't really do anything about this - the stories all seem to stop short. The quality picks up in the 2nd section, where we see some of the types stories for which Jackson is well known, macabre elements incorporated seamlessly into ordinary life: the man who sits next to a young boy on a train and, across the aisle from mom and sister, tells gruesome stories, to the mom's horror and the boy's delight; or woman who needs to train her dog to stay out of a chicken coop and receives a series of horrifying suggestions about how to do so: chain a dead chicken around the dog's neck, for example, and everyone but the woman is undisturbed by these suggestions. Other stories are just tendentious and easy to see through right from the beginning: the boy who's misbehaving at school and tells his parents of a misbehaving child named "Charles" - we can see this coming a mile away, even if the characters can't.