Originally I intended to listen to the first episode of The Sandman audiobook. I love the graphic novel series—have read it multiple times—and just finished watching the series on Netflix. I’m not much of an audiobook person, having only listened to books on tape during long road trips. So I was extra curious to see how they would/would not be able to translate the color and the aesthetic that is prominent in the art of this series. I am still very curious to listen to this fully, but for my review I went in another direction. The teaser sample of this audiobook series is of such high production value and has many famous actors voicing the characters—if you didn’t know it was only audio, you would think it was from a big-budget movie—so I decided I’d be better served listening to something else for inspiration for our own project.

As my group is going to be working with short stories, I turned to one of my favorite authors and perhaps her most famous short story: The Lottery by Shirley Jackson.

This was the first hit that came up when I searched for an audiobook, and I appreciated that this seems to be part of a ghost story audiobook/podcast series, so I gave it a listen. The intro (and outro) are very stylized, with creepy imagery and very eerie background music with voice clips from other horror stories. It’s a bit over the top, but mostly fun. In contrast, the reading of the text itself is very plain and even understated.

Tony Walker reads the story with an English accent. At first I thought, ugh, is this to make it sound more literary or more serious in some way? Jackson has said the setting is rural New England. However, after he completes his reading of the story, he spends some time talking about the story, wherein he says he felt he could read this story in his native Northern English accent expressly because it feels so much like a story that could be set in any rural, anglicized area. I’m inclined to agree with him. It also made me curious to listen to some of his other stories and see how he chooses accents for those, and how well they fit those stories. From his discussion, it seems Walker is a bit of a voice actor and seems able to make decisions on accents based on the stories he chooses to record.

I read along as Walker narrated, and I noticed a few alterations in some words between his version and mine. The changes were so slight I’m unsure if it was human error while he was reading, or if there are subtle differences in versions depending on the edition you have, or if indeed he deliberately chose to change some of the language. (I have Shirley Jackson: Novels and Stories, published in 2010 by The Library of America, but here is a link to The New Yorker, where it was first published in 1948: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/06/26/the-lottery). When he discusses the story after reading it, he shows a lot of reverence for Jackson, so I’m inclined to think he accidentally changes a couple of words as he’s reading it, or else there exist slightly different versions of this story. [Example: In the opening paragraph in my version of the story, it reads, “…but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took less than two hours….”; the version he gives, and which I also see in The New Yorker, reads, “but in this village, where there were only about three hundred people, the whole lottery took only about two hours…”.]

Walker reads slower than I would if I was reading on my own, but not so slowly as to draw the story out unnecessarily. His pacing is very methodical and even throughout, though he does slow down as we get to the climax and realize that something is very much amiss in the town ceremony. Indeed, he adds more repetition and emphasis on “the black dot” when we realize it’s Tessie Hutchinson who’s been selected for the lottery. Jackson wrote: “It had a black spot on it, the black spot Mr. Summers had made the night before with the heavy pencil in the coal-company office.” But Walker adds in an extra “The Black Spot” so the spot is mentioned three times instead of two. I believe this change from the original text was an intentional editorial choice on Walker’s part, and that it enhances the audio experience.

Walker does slightly alter his voice for different characters’ dialogue, just enough to help a listener who isn’t also reading along, but not so much that he sounds cartoonish or mocking of any of the characters. And he slightly alters the level of his voice when people are talking versus whispering or speaking in hushed tones. Again, I think his choices enhances the text, rather than detracting from it. He does not use any background noise or add music or sound effects, which we know was a deliberate choice for him based on the way he’s chosen to style his intro and outro for his series. From his discussion after the story, I learned that he has specialty audio recording equipment, and you can tell the sound quality is very high, and his diction is crisp. He has a podcast, and he’s clearly very comfortable in front of a mic. I also learned that he started doing live readings, which included video of him, which his viewers gave mixed responses to. As such, he seems to be making two versions of each of his stories: one live with video of him reading; and another with some sound-editing that is just his voice. It seems like a lot of work, but I appreciate that he’s open feedback and understands there are pros and cons to each type of audio experience for his audience.

Overall I think his reading of The Lottery was very good. I felt very much like he could have been sitting in my living room and reading directly to me.