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Night-gaunts and other tales of suspense / Joyce Carol Oates.
520 "The Woman in the Window"...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.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780802128102 (hc)
- Physical Description: 335 pages ; 22 cm
- Edition: First edition.
- Publisher: New York : The Mysterious Press, 2018.
- Copyright: ©2018.
Content descriptions
| Formatted Contents Note: | The woman in the window-- The long-legged girl-- Sign of the beast-- The experimental subject-- Walking wounded-- Night-gaunts. |
Search for related items by subject
| Subject: | Short stories, American. Violence > Fiction Lust > Fiction |
| Genre: | Psychological fiction. Suspense fiction. Short stories. |
Show Only Available Copies
| Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Holdable? | Status | Due Date |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fort Nelson Public Library | FIC OAT (Text) | 35246000954576 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| 100 Mile House Branch | OAT (Text) | 33923005984194 | Suspense | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Castlegar Public Library | FIC OAT (Text) | 35146002097897 | Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Gibsons Public Library | FIC OATE (Text) | 30886001055538 | Adult Fiction Hardcover | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Kitimat Public Library | Oat (Text) | 32665002113845 | Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Pender Island Public Library | OAT (Text)
Format: Hardcover |
33126000281240 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Quesnel Branch | OAT (Text) | 33923005984202 | Suspense | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Rossland Public Library | FIC OAT (Text) | 35162001005898 | Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Squamish Public Library | F OAT (Text) | 33110003359799 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Tumbler Ridge Public Library | AF OATES (Text) | TRL23984 | Adult Fiction | Volume hold | Available | - |
| Williams Lake Branch | OAT (Text) | 33923005983972 | Suspense | Volume hold | Available | - |
- Booklist Reviews : Booklist Reviews 2018 May #1
In her latest "tales of suspense" collection, following DIS MEM BER (2017), Oates dramatizes mysteries of the mind, her forte. An expert in crafting escalating inner monologues as her narrators struggle against malevolent circumstances and the mental aberrations trauma engenders, Oates continues her audacious inquiry into sexual terrors in six substantial, insightful, and creepy stories. Overweight, aging, boozy New England faculty wife Elinor decides to take revenge, but only in the fairest way possible, against the latest beautiful "long-legged girl" entrancing her husband. In "Sign of the Beast," young Howard, husky, clumsy, and tagged with a birthmark on his cheek, is appalled and aroused by his wildly inappropriate Sunday-school teacher, and when her body is found, his reaction shocks everyone. Oates unites a vulnerable misfit and a mad scientist in "The Experimental Subject," a grotesque tale with a redemptive twist. The intriguing title tale is a sensitive, clever, and affecting tribute to horror master H. P. Lovecraft, who coined "night-gaunts" to describe the eerie creatures that plagued him. Oates' spookiness is visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute. Copyright 2018 Booklist Reviews. - Kirkus Reviews : Kirkus Reviews 2018 April #1
The latest in Oates' (Beautiful Days, 2018, etc.) vast bibliography further explores the tense dynamic between lust and revulsion that has been the terrain of much of the author's recent work. The characters who wince through this intimate, unrelenting collection are people who live on the periphery of larger lives. We meet a frustrated faculty wife whose identity has been eclipsed by both her husband and his lovely female students ("The Long-Legged Girl"); a teenage boy whose lusts are baffled by the double-speak of an adult world that castigates him even as it draws him in ("Sign of the Beast"); a mistress waiting in doubled yearning and disgust for her brutish lover's arrival ("The Woman in the Window"). A longtime master of the unreliable narrator, Oates lures the reader into compacts with characters whose sympathies turn out to be warped or downright murderous. Is the pitiable L____ in "Walking Wounded" excising snippets of sadist eroticism from a scholar's posthumous wo rk, or is he creating them in his own active life? Is the grown son in the title story the victim of his father's paranoid madness or the inheritor of his infectious damnation? In the most challenging story of the collection, "The Experimental Subject," Oates details the scientific process by which N____, a senior lab technician at a prestigious university, woos the unwitting woman who will gestate the first human/chimpanzee hybrid fetus. N____, who is described as having "the advantage of invisibility that is the particular prerogative of his species: deceptively bland Asian face, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, short-cropped very black glossy hair," chooses the dim, hopelessly naïve Mary Frances for her isolation, her vulnerability, her "stolid mammalian figure," and her coincidental likeness to the chimpanzee sperm donor who fathers her child. It is a fever dream of a storyâforthrightly nightmarishâwhich gleefully transgresses the boundaries of identity politics i n favor of the earthiest of human truths, and yet there is very little work done to examine the moral implications of the situation from the other side of those boundaries. As with many of the stories in the collection, "The Experimental Subject" ends in a flurry of unlikely action, signifying not so much character or plot resolution as the author's weariness of the situation in which her characters have been embroiled. Consummately well-written, stylistically dashing, but lacking a commitment to engage with the trickier dilemmas of race, class, and gender Oates uses to motivate her plots. Copyright Kirkus 2018 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved. - Library Journal Reviews : LJ Reviews 2018 January #1
From a jealous wife's playing Russian roulette with Wedgewood teacups to a visualization of Edward Hopper's
Copyright 2017 Library Journal.Eleven A.M., 1926 : six creepy stories. - Publishers Weekly Reviews : PW Reviews 2018 April #2
The eponymous creatures haunting the Providence, R.I., mansion where the gothic title story is set seem about as terrifying as toddlers draped in bedsheets compared to some of the humans in this unsettling collection from Oates (
Copyright 2018 Publishers Weekly.Beautiful Days ). "Sign of the Beast" centers on Mrs. S___, a sadistic Sunday school teacher who both angers and sexually arouses her lumbering, self-conscious student, Howard. In "Walking Wounded," L___, a 41-year-old cancer patient "eviscerated" by his surgeries, starts stalking a wraithlike young womanâwhen he's not fantasizing about chloroform and dumping a body in the local lake. Ghastliest of all, however, are the scientific researchers of "The Experimental Subject," in which senior technician N___, acting with the enthusiastic backing of his government-funded primate laboratory team, performs an experiment on ungainly undergrad Mary Frances that may raise the hackles of #MeToo supporters. The upsetting journey is in no way redeemed by the slapdash resolution. Oates pushes the boundary between the disturbing and the offensive with mixed results. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)
