Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, Joyce Carol Oates writes: Life was not of the surface like the glossy skin of an apple, but deep inside the fruit where seeds are harbored. There is no writer more capable of picking out those seeds and exposing all their secret tastes and poisons than Oates herself―as brilliantly demonstrated in these six stories. The book opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper’s Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In “The Long-Legged Girl,” an aging, jealous wife crafts an unusual game of Russian roulette involving a pair of Wedgewood teacups, a strong Bengal brew, and a lethal concoction of medicine. Who will drink from the wrong cup, the wife or the dance student she believes to be her husband’s latest conquest? In “The Sign of the Beast,” when a former Sunday school teacher’s corpse turns up, the blighted adolescent she had by turns petted and ridiculed confesses to her murder―but is he really responsible? Another young outsider, Horace Phineas Love, Jr., is haunted by apparitions at the very edge of the spectrum of visibility after the death of his tortured father in “Night-Gaunts,” a fantastic ode to H.P. Lovecraft. Reveling in the uncanny and richly in conversation with other creative minds, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense stands at the crossroads of sex, violence, and longing―and asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves.

Bookreporter

“The Woman in the Window” is included in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017 "[A] cutting edge collection...full of rare, believable scenarios that can make the heart race or cause us to ponder our own mortality...Night Gaunts is like a paranoid daydream, yet one where it is satisfying to know that you can awaken with a sounder mind than before it began."

Kirkus Reviews

"Consummately well-written,stylistically dashing...forthrightly nightmarish"

Booklist Praise for Joyce Carol Oates:

"Oates’ spookiness is visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute."

Seattle Times,

“Few writers better illuminate the mind’s most disturbing corners.”

New York Times Book Review, on The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

“Oates’s brand of horror has never required the invocation of other worlds: This world is terrible enough for her. Everything she writes, in whatever genre, has an air of dread, because she deals in vulnerabilities and inevitabilities, in the desperate needs that drive people . . . to their fates. A sense of helplessness is the essence of horror, and Oates conveys that feeling as well as any writer around.”

St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

“Does any writer around do literary creepy like Joyce Carol Oates? . . . The stories always have an undercurrent of menace poised to break through at any moment.”

Boston Globe, on Evil Eye

“A dazzling, disturbing tour de force of Gothic suspense.”

Times (UK), on High Crime Area

“This writer is extraordinary not because she produces such huge amount, but because what she produces is so consistently good. And short stories show her invention, economy and control at its best . . . Oates perfectly captures the atmosphere of fear and well-meaning misunderstanding.”

Kirkus Reviews, on DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

“Oates creates worlds and minds as overwrought and paranoid as anything a female Poe could imagine, then sprinkles her trademark exclamation points licentiously through the interior monologues to heighten the intimacy between ecstasy and madness.”

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From “The Woman in the Window” What’s the time? Eleven A.M. He will be late coming to her. Always he is late coming to her. At the corner of Lexington and Thirty-seventh. Headed south. The one with the dark fedora, camel’s-hair coat. Whistling thinly through his teeth. Not a tall man though he gives that impression. Not a large man but he won’t give way if there’s another pedestrian in his path. Excuse me, mister! Look where the hell you’re going. Doesn’t break his stride. Only partially conscious of his surroundings. Face shut up tight. Jaws clenched. Murder rushing to happen. The woman in the window, he likes to imagine her. He has stood on the sidewalk three floors below. He has counted the windows of the brownstone. Knows which one is hers. After dark, the lighted interior reflected against the blind makes of the blind a translucent skin. When he leaves her. Or, before he comes to her.

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of such national bestsellers as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Her other titles for The Mysterious Press include DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense, which includes the Bram Stoker Award-winning story “The Crawl Space”; The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection; and Jack of Spades. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for them and the 2010 President’s National Humanities Medal.

Reviews

News