Celestial Timepiece

By Joyce Carol Oates

A young wife is home alone when the phone rings in “So Help Me God.” Is the strange voice flirting with her from the other end of the phone her jealous husband laying a trap, or a stranger who knows entirely too much about her? In “Madison at Guignol” an unhappy fashionista discovers a secret door inside her favorite clothing store and insists the staff let her enter. But even her fevered imagination cannot anticipate the horror they have been hiding from her. In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.

With wicked insight, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates why the females of the species—be they six-year-old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or aging mothers—are by nature more deadly than the males.

Contents

• So Help Me God
• The Banshee
• Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi
• Madison at Guignol
• The Haunting
• Hunger
• Tell Me You Forgive Me?
• Angel of Wrath
• Angel of Mercy

Awards

• Best American Mystery Stories, 2006: “So Help Me God”
• National Magazine Awards, 2006 finalist: “So Help Me God”
• Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, 2004: “The Haunting”
• Best American Mystery Stories, 2004: “Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi”
• Bram Stoker Award, 2003 nomination: “The Haunting”
• International Horror Guild Award for Short Fiction, 2001 nomination: “Angel of Mercy”

Book Covers

Excerpt

From “Angel of Mercy”

A pillow. A pillow is best. She’d come to believe so. for when the patient is smothered, oxygen ceases to flow to the brain and the heart races and lunges and begins to falter and fails and will stop. And where, in the City of the Damned, hearts are old, leaky, strained, there is a yearning to stop. And so an ordinary pillow over the mouth and nose satisfies this yearning. And so the death pronouncement will be cardiac arrest. And so no physician would suspect, for why would he? Nor any nurse, mostly. Though Agnes must be alert to her sister nurses who look upon her (she has reason to think) with some suspicion.

Criticism

Deadly Girls’ Voices, Suspense, and the “Aesthetics of Fear” in Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Banshee” and “Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi” by Pascale Antolin in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies.

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly, September 19, 2005, p. 40
• Library Journal, October 1, 2005, p. 62
• Booklist, October 15, 2005, p. 33
• Kirkus Reviews, November 1, 2005, p. 1165
• New York Times, January 22, 2006, Sec. 7, p. 14
• St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), January 29, 2006, p. F8
• Boston Globe, March 5, 2006, p. E7
• San Diego Union-Tribune, April 9, 2006, Books, p. 1
• Atlanta Journal-Constitution, June 4, 2006, p. 5K
• The Observer (England), June 11, 2006, Review, p. 23