Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

From a master "mind reader who writes psychological horror stories about seriously disturbed minds" (New York Times Book Review), this gorgeously eerie story collection explores the deepest entwinings of lust and repulsion, creation and dissolution, Eros and Thanatos.

In the title story of her taut new fiction collection, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, 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 brilliantly demonstrated in these six stories.

The book 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 Wedgewood 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? 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.

Reveling in the uncanny and richly in conversation with other creative minds, Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense stands at the crossroads of sex, violence, and longing--and asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves.

Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Mysterious Press
Published: 04/02/2019
Pages: 352
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.75lbs
Size: 8.20h x 5.40w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780802129666

About the Author
Joyce Carol Oates is the author of such national bestsellers as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Her other titles for The Mysterious Press include DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense, which includes the Bram Stoker Award-winning story "The Crawl Space"; The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection; and Jack of Spades. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for them and the 2010 President's National Humanities Medal.