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The central haunting of this collection of 16 tales is not anything so concrete as a building haunted by a ghost, but rather the interior haunting of a human being by their ever-shifting sense of self. As Joyce Carol Oates puts it (in a fascinating afterword on the nature and history of the grotesque), "The subjectivity that is the essence of the human is also the mystery that divides us irrevocably from others . . . all others are, in the deepest sense, strangers." These stories, while all dark, cover a range of styles and subjects. Some are vividly violent; several are subtle and/or ironic. The New York Times praised this collection for "pull[ing] off what this author does best: exploring the tricky juncture between tattered social fabric and shaky psyche, while serving up some choice macabre moments."
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From Publishers Weekly
Fiction machine Oates ( Foxfire ) industriously cranks out her 18th short-story collection, a wide-ranging offering of 16 grisly tales. She knows which literary buttons to push, and while there's certainly suspense in these selections, it's accompanied by the recognition of a tried-and-true formula at work. "The grotesque always possesses a blunt physicality that no amount of epistemological exegesis can exorcise," writes Oates in an afterword, and this broad definition characterizes the multifaceted and invariably disturbing selections here. These include the previously unpublished "Blind," a first-person account of an old woman who awakens during a thunderstorm to find herself blind and her husband dead; the similarly horrifying "Poor Bibi," about a couple that mistreats a dog; and "Accursed Inhabitants of the Bly," a reworking of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw . All the pieces here have a redeeming literary bent, although some are transparent in their motives. Undoubtedly a master of this form, Oates plies her craft like a skilled seducer, setting the mood and moving in for the conquest night after night after night.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
