“The Premonition” (1992)

Here’s another remarkable story by Joyce Carol Oates from her Haunted collection. Kirkus Reviews called it the best of the bunch in a rave review from 1994. I’m more inclined to give that honor to the title story, but this one is awfully good too. It never outright tells us what it is at elaborate pains to make perfectly clear. A few days before Christmas, Whitney has a premonition about his older brother Quinn. He drives over to Quinn’s mansion to check on him. There is a rumor Quinn has started drinking again after 11 months of sullenly attending AA meetings under some type of intervention pressure. His wife and two daughters are often bruised or patched up. Quinn is the obvious culprit. He has been brazenly planning to spend the holidays in the Seychelles with a girlfriend. So it’s not surprising Whitney would have a bad feeling about Quinn any time he thought about him. He is trouble itself walking around. When Whitney gets to Quinn’s place Quinn is not there but his wife Ellen and the girls Molly and Trish are, all of them in strangely high spirits. Molly is 14 and Trish 11. The house is in some disarray, with half-packed boxes and trunks and suitcases all over the place. They don’t seem to know where Quinn is. He’s gone on business, and they say they’ll be hearing from him when he finishes his business trip, when they plan to meet in Europe. It’s all quite vague, but it’s obvious the traditional family Christmas is off for this year. Still, they are happy and excited to see Whitney, the girls’ “favorite uncle.” The clues become more obvious—by the shape and size of some of the boxes, and the bathtub has been recently scrubbed with kitchen cleanser. Oates establishes a narrative tempo that enables her to use misdirection skillfully. She never has to tell us what probably happened, and she never does. She just plants it in our heads, where it festers. It’s likely that the probable slaughter in its vivid details (as imagined) is what we will remember of this story, even though Oates refrains entirely from doing any more than suggesting it by implication. We learn enough about Quinn that we never lose sympathy for Ellen and the girls even as our certainty about what they did only grows. The story—the collection—is more evidence that Oates is one of the best writers of short horror we’ve got.

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