One morning in North Bennington, Vt.—where most of the townsfolk regarded her as a bit of an oddball—Shirley Jackson was pushing her daughter in a stroller on the way to the grocery store. She’d been reading a book about human sacrifice and wondered who in her prosaic village would be a good candidate for that sort of thing. When she got home, she put away her groceries and began typing her most famous story, “The Lottery” (1948), about a public stoning in a village very like North Bennington. She was finished in time for lunch.

Perhaps...