By Joyce Carol Oates

New York: Mysterious Press, 2024
256 Pages

flint-kill-creekA haunting new collection of eerie, mysterious, and chilling tales by one of America’s greatest writers

These new, recent, and reconsidered stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense, highlighting the celebrated author’s macabre talents.

In the title story, an insecure young woman grows increasingly dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. In another tale, a man is so forgetful that his wife panics, fearing that he has lost their infant daughter. Unspoken horrors are suspected beneath the appearance of marital bliss. A careerist is driven mad by professional jealousy. A passing romantic fling takes a perilous turn.

Each story is a “compact gem of unease” (Publishers Weekly) and each charts its own unpredictable path into darkness. The result is an unsettling collection that could only spring from the mind of Joyce Carol Oates, an author whose provocative formal experimentations continually yield surprising and intriguing results.

table of contentsContents

  • Flint Kill Creek information
  • The Phlebotomist information
  • The Heiress. The Hireling. information
  • Weekday information
  • *** information
  • Friend of My Heart information
  • Bone Marrow Donor information
  • Happy Christmas information
  • The Nice Girl information
  • Mick & Minn information
  • Late Love information
  • The Siren: 1999 information

""Awards

Book Covers

reviews, starts, 5Reviews

Publishers Weekly, September 2, 2024, page 45
4 stars
The proximity of love and hate—or at least attraction and violence—animate most of the tales, each a compact gem of unease…. Oates’s prose is surgically precise, and her appetite for the grotesque falls on the right side of lurid. The author’s admirers will be thrilled.

Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2024, page 20
4 stars
Despite the collection’s subtitle and its publication by the Mysterious Press, none of these tales is a traditional mystery, and most are suspenseful only in the broad sense that all effective fiction is…. Fever dreams for readers with a taste for freak shows that just might be about them.

Posted on 0 By Randy Souther Books Posted in Books Tagged #,
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Randy Souther

I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.

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