| Suspense fiction |
| Short stories |
| Suspense tales |
| Tales, Suspense |
| Thrillers (Fiction) |
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Summary
Summary
Joyce Carol Oates is an unparalleled investigator of human flaws. In these eight stories, she deftly tests the bonds between damaged individuals--a brother and sister, a teacher and student, two strangers on a subway--in the fearless prose for which she's become so celebrated.
In the title story "High Crime Area," a white, aspiring professor is convinced she is being followed. No need to panic, she has a handgun stowed away in her purse--just in case. But when she turns to confront her black, male shadow, the situation isn't what she expects. In "The Rescuer," a promising graduate student detours to inner city Trenton, New Jersey to save her brother from a downward spiral. But she soon finds out there may be more to his world than to hers. And in "The Last Man of Letters," the world-renowned author X embarks on a final grand tour of Europe. He has money, fame, but not a whole lot of manners. A little thing like etiquette couldn't bring a man like X down, could it?
In these biting and beautiful stories, Oates confronts, one by one, the demons within us. Sometimes it's the human who wins, and sometimes it's the demon.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Each of the six performers chosen to narrate Oates's collection of dark character studies suits the atmosphere of malaise and despair that emerges from the author's odd, elegant prose. Ray Chase starts the collection by portraying an orderly at a facility for the elderly in "The Home at Craigmillnar," with a dispassionate voice as the character describes the discovery of the body of an aged, unloved nun. Chris Patton provides a tense, anxious history of the child in "Demon," who has suffered most of his young life, while Tamara Marston employs a plaintive yearning in "Lorelei," in which the title character searches for a touch of humanity in the subways of New York. Donna Pastel uses a dry and mildly distracted approach for "High," in which a middle-aged widow tries to cope with the loss of her husband, first with marijuana, then by courting danger. Whelan shifts from determined to dreamy in "The Rescuer," as the promising grad student who travels to Trenton, N.J., to save her brother from a druggy vortex, only to find herself slipping in. Finally, reader Luci Christian finds the perfect hardboiled teenager voice for the 13-year-old narrator of "Toad-Baby," a grim, not-quite-nuclear family tale that, surprisingly for Oates, ends with more than a hint of hope. A Mysterious hardcover. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
From Oates (Carthage, 2014, etc.) comes this collection of eight stories, seven previously published, that explore the depths of human despair and cruelty. A retired nun is found dead with a muslin veil over her face in "The Home at Craigmillnar." Although the nun was a cardiac patient, the orderly who reports her death knows enough about her dark past to suggest that she might have died from something other than natural causes. In "High," a lonely widow seeks escape from her grief even as she opens herself up to exploitation by those she once tried to help. A 13-year-old girl has to protect her half brother from an indifferent world and their alcoholic mother in "Toad-Baby." "Lorelei" is a needy woman who searches the subways for love and hopes that people will notice her. In "Demon," a mentally challenged youth goes to extremes to eliminate the sign of the devil in his own body. The would-be heroine of "The Rescuer" is a cultural anthropologist who leaves her ivory tower to save her brother from a terrifying local culture and is slowly pulled into it. "The Last Man of Letters" is an arrogant author who thinks he's receiving the adulation he deserves until he realizes how much he's hated. Finally, an idealistic young teacher in 1967 Detroit has to face the fears that are personified by the man following her in "High Crime Area." Oates is at her best here when she's writing about floundering academics thrust into situations for which they're hopelessly ill-prepared. Oates' mastery of imagery and stream of consciousness enhances the gritty settings and the frailties of her grotesque and pitiable subjects.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Oates (Evil Eye, 2013) carries forward the great American dark-tales tradition with spellbinding craft, a cutting female eye, and a keen sense of how the diabolical infiltrates everyday existence, masterfully conjuring realms grotesque, erotic, and ironic. She begins with a neatly feinting revenge story about a conscientious orderly and a nun who once ran a notorious orphanage. We meet an ethereal, wealthy widow who naively decides that marijuana will ease her pain, a prescription for mayhem. Oates portrays with forensic exactitude misshapen and abused children and a sexist celebrity writer who gets his comeuppance. The Rescuer is a complex and haunting tale about family and race centered on a dutiful young woman trying to help her brother in the drug-poisoned heart of Trenton, New Jersey. Oates extends her inquiry into the racial divide and returns to another of her signature settings, Detroit circa 1967, in the exquisitely frank and distressing title story about the fears of a young, white English teacher. Powerhouse Oates brings both exterior and interior worlds into excruciatingly sharp focus, evoking dread, grim exaltation, and the paralysis of prey. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Oates' potent dark tales are addictive, and her readers' habit must be fed.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2014 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
WHENEVER SOME FRESH instance of blatant corruption or rank depravity comes to light in Italy (toxic waste in agricultural Campania, political scandal in Lombardia, a proposal to build an ugly skyscraper in Mestre), Commissario Guido Brunetti, the principled protagonist of Donna Leon's uplifting Venetian mysteries, looks to his family and to the wise philosophers of ancient Rome to restore his faith in humanity. Leon tends to console herself by writing a new book. BY ITS COVER (Atlantic Monthly, $26), which finds the author in a fury over vandalism and theft in national libraries, museums and churches, appears to have been inspired by the looting of Naples's Girolamini Library by its director, a systematic sacking of thousands of rare books that came to light in 2012. ("It would make a stone weep," according to one of Brunetti's colleagues.) Although the criminal damage done at the venerable Biblioteca Merula is on a far more modest scale, it's no less heartbreaking to the library director, as well as to the commissario. It's also a great mystery. How was the damage done when the only patrons of this obscure library are innocuous scholars like Joseph Nickerson, an American academic researching maritime and Mediterranean trade history, and an ex-priest affectionately known as Tertullian for his obsessive study of the writings of the Church Fathers? The melancholy tone of the storytelling suits the narrative, especially when the ex-priest is found savagely murdered. Crimes against the elderly always distress the compassionate Brunetti, but in this extraordinary case even a murderer touches his heart. What angers him beyond endurance are the corrupt public officials, his own superiors in the police department among them, who aid and abet the crooks who make their fortunes by sacrificing their country's cultural heritage. But the scent of spring in the air draws Brunetti out of his gloomy thoughts and into the life of the city. Walking is a joy, and an official interview is just as easily conducted away from the office, in the "elegant dilapidation" of the Caffe Florian. But even a sip of spring can be poisoned by the sight of a gigantic cruise ship lumbering up the Grand Canal. TIME IS KIND to a rebel who dies young - everybody else is doomed to grow up and lose his ideals. That's the bummer memo Peter Robinson posts in CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION (Morrow, $25.99), a sobering mystery featuring his Yorkshire detective, Chief Inspector Alan Banks. A murder investigation always begins with the victim, but all we know about Gavin Miller, an impoverished recluse who came to a violent end on a derelict railway line, is that this 59-year-old man had a comprehensive collection of arty foreign films and enough Grateful Dead albums to qualify as a Dead Head. Always a graceful stylist, Robinson is also known for his meticulous procedural methods. So it takes diligent police work to turn up the information that Miller had been dismissed from a teaching position, charged with "sexual indiscretion," and more digging to establish that he was probably set up. But the origins of this sad, twisted tale ultimately reach back to the late '60s and '70s, when everyone wanted to be a rebel and no one considered the cost. THRILLER WRITERS DO love their gimmicks, and Owen Laukkanen has come up with a sickeningly original one. For reasons that don't bear close scrutiny, in his novels ordinary people with no criminal footprint take on new lives as bank robbers and kidnappers. That high concept darkens considerably in KILL FEE (Putnam, $26.95) when a heartless predator recruits shellshocked young vets and programs them to become killing machines. According to this creep's twisted logic, he's "simply a service provider filling a vacuum in the market" by catering to clients on his website, Killswitch. Laukkanen's fast-paced, no-frills style is brisk, blunt and fueled entirely by adrenaline, the better to keep us from thinking too hard. But no authorial shenanigans can disguise the schematic nature of his two crime-stoppers, a hot-wired female F.B.I. agent based in Minneapolis and a laidback male cop from St. Paul. Stunt writing makes her the hard-nosed tough guy and gives him the squeamish morality issues. But, truth to tell, those human zombies have far more personality than either of them. SOME PEOPLE READ poetry at bedtime. Others prefer seed catalogs. May I suggest instead Joyce Carol Oates's new story collection, HIGH CRIME AREA (Mysterious, $23)? These "tales of darkness and dread" won't put you to sleep, but they'll give you more interesting nightmares. Here's one, set in Detroit in 1967, about a young white teacher who's so terrified of the black male students in her evening composition class that she carries a gun. ("I am very ashamed of my fear," she admits.) Here's another, about an acclaimed literary figure who learns too late that he has cause to fear the women he habitually humiliates. And one more: about a 13-year-old girl trying to keep her mother from killing her baby brother. In a way, every story is a character study, not necessarily well rounded, but sure to focus a basilisk eye on the weak spot that reveals our own ugly impulses and makes us defenseless against the terrors of the night. . . . Sweet dreams.
Library Journal Review
Among the most compelling of Oates's many literary personae is the one with a deep-rooted interest in the pathology of criminals and their crimes. Her latest story collection opens with a Roger Ackroyd-like confession that elicits the reader's sympathy before the crime itself is described ("The Home at Craigmillnar"). The other stories range from horror to dark comedy, including a revenge fantasy perpetrated on a misogynistic world-renowned writer ("The Last Man of Letters"). Oates is particularly adept at revealing the lure of the criminal element among failed or failing academics who drift well beyond the statute of limitations of their doctoral degrees. VERDICT These stories take the reader to desolate intersections and grimy tenements that mirror the dark reaches of the human soul; the combined elements of literary fiction with genre fiction and true crime offer added audience appeal. [See Prepub Alert, 10/20/13.]-Sue Russell, Bryn Mawr, PA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.