Previously unpublished, “Paranoia” by Shirley Jackson reads like a prototypical Philip K. Dick or Hitchcock yarn. It centers on a man named Beresford as he makes his way home from work for his wife’s birthday while attempting to evade a mysterious man who seems to be everywhere at once. There are some goodly unsettling moments here, where background characters may not be who they seem — even the mysterious stranger himself alternates between menacing and ambivalent — but it’s really the distance imposed by the language (the protagonist is consistently referred to only as “Mr. Beresford”) and the deliberately spare choice of details (the stranger is “the man in the light hat”) that succeed in amping up the unease. For a story written half a century ago the details are so choice that it reads like it could have taken place in 2013 New York, excepting the fact that the subway no longer costs a nickel to ride.

While the story doesn’t amount to too much it did make me appreciate the subversiveness of Jackson; her most famous story “The Lottery” was a New Yorker premiere, and one wonders what it would take to make a New Yorker story of today feel equally boundary-pushing and revelatory.