Panic City: Shirley Jackson's New York stories

After coming down pretty hard on Shirley Jackson's short stories in yesterday's post, I have to add today that The Lottery is as good a story as you'll ever read: mysterious, creepy, provocative, beautifully paced, understated narrative. It's obvious why it is anthologized so often and why it has essentially made Jackson's literary reputation and ensured that she is still read, to a degree, today. I wonder, though, whether it makes us expect from her fiction something that she couldn't or wouldn't deliver: do we expect all her stories to touch on the bizarre and the macabre, do we expect her to be a scriptwriter for The Twilight Zone? Only a few of the stories (in her only story collection, "The Lottery and Other Stories") have the a similar creepiness and disassociation - and they cluster near the end of the book (are they her more mature stories? The Modern Library edition give no hint as to publishing history or chronology): The Tooth, about a woman who goes to New York to have a tooth extracted and experiences some odd hallucinations (like too many other Jackson stories, the premise promises a lot, but she doesn't completely deliver) or the story about a Vermont couple who go to New York for a vacation and the woman gradually gets overwhelmed by panic and dread: it will remind readers of the great The Yellow Wallpaper. The intro to the Modern Library edition suggests that scapegoats are a major theme running through Jackson's stories, and I suppose that's true - she is interested in needless cruelty and in outsiders - but other stories quite effectively establish a milieu of anxiety - but then do very little with that premise or mood. There are some great moments throughout this collection, but to the extent that Jackson is a great or even very good writer, it's not evident from the stories, with the exception of The Lottery: these are trial runs for greater works.