“Haunted” (1987)

I was impressed by this Joyce Carol Oates story, which shifts tones so swiftly and deftly it’s almost dizzying. It ranges from the coming-of-age story of two 11-year-old girls to a fairy tale, a ghost story, and a true-crime story, all with bolts of calculated erotic charge. The first-person narrator, writing as an adult, recounts these childhood incidents, not sure exactly what might have happened. She’s not even sure why she’s writing about it. But we can sense the damage she has suffered. Much of the story reads like a reminiscence of childhood, but there are worrisome undercurrents. Families who don’t like one another. People who move away from the town and are never heard from again. Abandoned properties—either by foreclosure or by death. They are the haunted houses—houses left unoccupied and ripe for rumors, especially when they are decrepit and crumbling to wreckage. Oates captures that sense of childhood boredom and adventure perfectly. But the rambling sentences and rushed-together way of telling it constantly remind us something is gnawing away at the narrator. The ghost in the haunted house, when it finally appears, is startling, vivid, arresting, the erotic charge planted here with skill. The story has numerous very nice touches of the gothic. The apparition is closest to a witch, with evident mental powers to control her victim. The power of knowing a person’s name is played particularly well. I love everything about the scene with the ghost. It truly made me uneasy. Then it reverts to the childhood story again even as, against her will, the narrator remembers how she betrayed her friend. She played her perfectly to goad her into going into the haunted house alone. In the ghost scene, there’s also a sense it could be a real person boldly manipulating an impressionable kid. Oates has a wonderful way of stepping around all the things that might be possible in these scenes, often by tonal inflections. When the second girl turns up dead and murdered, the language takes on the tone of true-crime, going all just-the-facts-ma’am on us, even as the narrator is obviously emotionally torn to shreds by the memory and the totality of it. It's altogether an electric jittery style, with long breathless sentences and multiple shifts in view. Our narrator might even be crazy and the events recounted all delusion.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
Story not available online.