Essay Comparing The Lottery And A Short Guide To The City

False sense of security is a prominent theme in the gothic genre as a whole it is a type of literature that combines both horror and romance. It is not surprising, then, that the general idea of false sense of security is explored in both stories “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “A Short Guide to the City” by Peter Straub, as an example both the urban and the rural setting claim to have little to no violence and that the people feel safe. While both stories share thematic interest in false sense of security, the rural setting of “The Lottery” and the urban setting of “A Short Guide to the City” uniquely shape the way we as readers feel about the meaning in each story.

In the short story “The Lottery”, the theme is emerged within a rural

The narrator throughout the story talks about this viaduct killer that has murdered 6 adult women, the different sectors of the town and there different ritualized violent acts. Yet no one wants to believe that these murders are caused by one of there own fine citizens. An example of the citizens false sense of security is “Forty years ago, in winter, the body of a woman was found on the banks of the river. She had been raped and murdered, ...a prostitute, never identified—and the noises of struggle that must have accompanied her death went un­noticed by the patrons of the Green Woman Taproom, located directly above that point on the river where her body was discovered. It was an abnormally cold winter that year, a winter of shared misery, and within the Green Woman the music was loud, feverish, festive.” (paragraph 6), because the body of the woman was never identified shows that the police never pursued the case and didn't care about what had happened and brushed it off. The narrator also explains that the music was loud, feverish and festive which gives the reader an idea of a city because the city is a loud place with clubs, bars and restaurants that are pretty occupied at