Here's a brief review of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" I recently did for Short Story I:

"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson

On the offhand, I'd say this story has a great line of progeny, most notably almost every other "Twilight Zone" episode, and Stephen King's "Children of the Corn." The "universal truth" centering the story is the unending willingness of humans to sacrifice for some common good. If the sacrifice involves bloodshed, all the better! And if it involves ganging up on the weak, there's nothing amiss therewith, from the subjective view of the mob. Most disturbingly, the "common good" can be vague, unusual, half forgotten; the ritual subsumes the goal. Certainly in the '40s when "Lottery" was written, the world had seen ample examples of all of the behaviors mentioned above: Fascism, Nazism, Communism. And we're not bereft of modern examples, including the near stoning of the woman in Nigeria a few weeks ago.

This is very much an "external" narrative. Without going into specifics (too hard to lug that gigantic book around), "The Lottery" is almost a stage piece. Everything, the crowd, the children, the stones, the box, has its starting point almost etched out in the dusty town square. Visually, one can imagine a pan shot as the camera descends from a high level view of the town to the street level. Then it pans again to crowds, faces, and actions. The narrator truly is the camera's eye in this setting.