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Title details for Night-Gaunts by Joyce Carol Oates - Available

Night-Gaunts

and Other Tales of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates
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Dark, brilliant fiction from the New York Times-bestselling author: “Oates’ spookiness is visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute.”―Booklist
In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, 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 demonstrated in these six stories.
One tale 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 Wedgwood 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? And 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.
“Consummately well-written, stylistically dashing...forthrightly nightmarish.”―Kirkus Reviews

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    May 14, 2020

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780802146281
      • File size: 2738 KB

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780802146281
      • File size: 7387 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      April 9, 2018
      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 (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 woman—when 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.

    • Booklist

      May 1, 2018
      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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

Formats

  • Kindle Book
  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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