Everyone has a different way to recover from post-hurricane distress. Some drink, some shop, some discuss hurricane seasons past. I read a collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson, The Lottery and Other Stories.

Let me rephrase that: I reread a collection of short stories by Shirley Jackson, having first read them about a year before. and I remember saying to a friend, "Gosh, she has got some kind of thing for men named James. Like, every other story has a James or a Jamie or a Jim in it."

I was really embarrassed when I read the collection again. First of all, it's not just James that's repeated, but the name Harris as well. Secondly, there is an epilogue, granted its own section in the collection. It's a few stanzas from a Child ballad, specifically Child ballad 243, "James Harris, the Daemon Lover." In defense of my having totally ignored this important detail for more than a year, let me just say that the epilogue is immediately preceded by the story "The Lottery", which scarred me badly when I first read about thirteen years ago, so much so that I now recover from stressful, scary situations by reading Shirley Jackson's other, comparatively tame stories.

I was intrigued by this new development in my moldy-smelling, falling-apart book. I mean, what kind of a name for a demon is James Harris? I could open the Mobile phone book and find five James Harrises. And isn't that a little horrible in and of itself, that a demon has been named and it is the name of a regular guy?

I reread the collection with an eye toward the James Harrises. The first story in which he appears (titled "The Daemon Lover", no less) begins with the main character, a rather lonely woman, on what she believes will be her wedding day. We see her preparing with attention to every small detail, worrying when her beloved is late, beginning to search for him, and, finally, returning again and again to the apartment door where his trail went cold, knocking and listening to the sound of soft voices on the other side. Her fiancé was named Jamie Harris.

In the main, the Harris-people are elusive, rarely accompanied by any physical description. They are presences, faceless intruders, bodiless voices over the telephone. In the story "Elizabeth", at a point at which the title character decided to chuck her current life and start again: "... and Jim Harris would have to help her; tonight would be only the first of many exciting dinners together, building into a lovely friendship that would get her a job and a sunny apartment; while she was planning her new life she forgot Jim Harris, his heavy face, his thin voice; he was a stranger, a gallant dark man with knowing eyes who watched her across a room, he was someone who loved her, he was a quiet troubled man who needed sunlight, a warm garden, green lawns..." I think the phrase "dark man" is especially apt, considering the other really important thing about this collection that I didn't notice on the first reading; each of the four main sections are introduced with a short passage from the Sadducismus Triumphatus, a seventeenth-century work on colonial witchcraft practices. Since "Dark Man" is a traditional description of Satan, this small thing sort of goes toward confirming my belief that the James and Harrises are little demons in human form.

While I was sitting up in bed last night, working on my schema of James Harrises throughout the structure of the collection, the lights went out for no reason! Isn't that scary? Everything was exceedingly dark and, even though only minutes before I had clearly seen my boyfriend reading quietly on our sofa, I said "Stephen? Are you still there?" because it really was incredibly quiet. He said, "Yeah," and I asked him if he would like to go ahead and come to bed since there was no more light to read by, and he said, "Okay, I'm just going to brush my teeth first."

I don't like talking to people I can't see, because he might have been replaced with a shape-shifting demon at any point since the lights went out and we had already wasted a lot of time. "Well, can you please hurry, because I was just reading Shirley Jackson and it's really dark in here." It is to his credit that he did not laugh, and also to his credit that he did not allow himself to be replaced by a shape-shifting demon at any point during our conversation.

The original ballad "James Harris, the Daemon Lover" goes something like this: James Harris returns to his native Scotland from Ireland and seeks out his fiancee. Unfortunately, she has married another in his absence, had two children, and basically forsaken James Harris.

That's great, he says. I could have married a king's daughter if I hadn't been faithful and promised to come back to you.

Why didn't you, then? asks his former fiancee, but he's got her interest now. A king's daughter? And he came back for me?

So, just out of curiosity, she says, what would you give me if I did decide to come with you? Eight ships and twenty-four sailors seems to be enough for her, so she abandons her children and takes off with James Harris.

Typically, he waits until they are well out to sea before revealing his cloven hooves and telling her he's taking her to hell. Then, in a fit of childish temper, he breaks the ship in half and drowns them both.

Applying this to Shirley Jackson's stories, I found only one Harris who did not appear first to a female character. The theme of domestic disruption can be found repeated in "Renegade" and "The Tooth", while in "The Villager" and "Just Like Mother Used to Make" the Harrises allow the women in the stories to adopt the picture of a domestic life which they do not, in fact, posses.

With the Jims and Harrises come change, both destructive and revealing. Is that what demons are, faceless people like natural disasters, ripping one out of the comfortable world and setting one down in another, more sinister one?

I flipped through "The Lottery", overcoming my great fear in the face of the greater desire to know if a Harris was called among the townspeople. There wasn't a Harris, but there was this: "Harburt...Hutchinson." What name would logically fit between those two but Harris? And isn't it worse that there is this gaping absence of a Harris, that these people don't need a demon, they are willing to do the work of one on their own?

In the course of my internet research on Shirley Jackson, I came across a web site created by a great fan of her work. The woman had written a pretty long biography of herself in order to illustrate how Shirley Jackson's writing had changed her own life. Like most of us, she experienced "The Lottery" first, in a high school English class. I was bothered by the fact that she wrote about how much she related to Tessie Hutchinson, the woman who bites it in the story.

"But wait," I thought. "Tessie showed up for the lottery smiling and joking. She knew what was going to happen, she just didn't want it to happen to her. How many lotteries had she participated in before, how many times had she been a murderer?" I think it's a common misconception to relate to someone who is killed, especially considering it was an entire town against one. But, for me, "The Lottery" is about a general inability to empathize with the pain of another until you yourself feel that pain. It's about indifference.

And that's sort of the beauty of Shirley Jackson, that there are no innocents, that no one takes the hand of that demon lover without first thinking of those eight ships, that king's daughter.