“The Affliction” (1995)

One thing you can say for sure about Joyce Carol Oates is that she’s both fearless and unrelenting about being gross when she wants to be. This includes posting pictures to social media, but here I am specifically talking about a story like this. The affliction of the title is a strange rash that also afflicts the young victim’s great-uncle. The doctors don’t know what it is or what to do about it, but the uncle does—it’s a matter of digging out biological “things” embedded under the skin, as he demonstrates. The highlights of the story are the descriptions of the “things”: “cobwebby strands of bloody mucus-matter, wormlike coils of puss, partly coagulated blood-clots.” Or, “The child had to be held as, with a deft hand, the uncle extracted the things, some of them no larger than a kernel of corn, some as large as a dime, throbbing with heat and of an odor of rankness, like an overripe peach. The operation took about forty minutes. The child screamed in pain and terror, thrashing in the tub.” Detailed scenes of the affliction feel like where Oates is most into it. They’re scattered all over the story. But then, as if to dignify an indulgence, the things become the source of the main character’s art. Over his lifetime—he’s in his 70s in the present time of the story—he becomes a great and renowned artist on the celebrity level, as I took it, of Picasso or Warhol. Oates is fascinated by art and the making of it, a frequent theme in her work. This story is making its metaphorical point obvious with the show of body horror: art is torn out of the artist, and it hurts. In this story art is organic in an unusually vivid way, the result of a process that doesn’t entirely involve consciousness. But it’s fair to say the story also exists to make us uncomfortable. The artist, in his 70s, is in the twilight of his career, fading. Remarkably, Oates does her horror work as a sideline project in an amazingly prolific career. This story, for any of its arguable flaws, is a prime example of one of the things she does best: shock, and more, shock with a purpose. The take on the agonies of art might be a little easy or overstated, but it’s real enough on its own terms. Art makes great demands of artists.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Collector of Hearts
Story not available online.

“Posthumous” (1994)

I came here ready to complain about this very short story by Joyce Carol Oates. Then I saw that it was published originally in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, in 1994, and somehow it became instantly more intriguing. What was she doing in Ellery Queen? Was she a regular? How did a story like this fit with the magazine’s usual fare? I never read it much but knew it as a competitor and sort of counterpoint to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. “Posthumous” is less than three printed pages. It is told from the point of view of a corpse, in a 21-gun salute to Edgar Allan Poe (10 years later, in 2004, she would publish a different and much longer story with a variant title of “Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House”). But maybe I am being hasty and she is a near-dead victim of violence, her own or another’s. She doesn’t seem to be able to move or speak. Police are forcing entry. Italicized passages suggest a home invasion. The police are shocked by her appearance but the twist of the story, as such, seems to be that there is worse in another room, presumably her husband. Did she do it or are they both victims? Unclear. It’s a horrific scene, like a tableau caught in the flash of a camera. It seems extreme to me for Ellery Queen, but perhaps not for 1994, which I remember as particularly lurid—Tonya Harding, Kurt Cobain, OJ Simpson, etc. I like that Oates had outlets for a lot of things like this that are experimental. Sometimes I am impatient with her female victimology, which she turns to a lot. But then, females are frequently victims. I like the Poe touch, if that’s what it is, and I guess I appreciate the ambiguity too of the murky situation. So I come out liking this one after some consideration. I believe Oates may have been at least a semi-regular in Ellery Queen but I would have to verify that. The way she uses the police is great and the point of view of the woman or corpse is perfect as they force their way in, vivid and sensory. And it’s really short, accomplished at near light-speed. The mayhem is gratuitous maybe? I was inclined to complain about that. But in many ways I think mayhem might be Oates’s most natural mode.

Joyce Carol Oates, The Collector of Hearts
Story not available online.

“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.

“Thanksgiving” (1993)

Here is another effective pile-on by Joyce Carol Oates—perhaps it piles on too much. It’s certainly not restrained. Calling Oates’s brand of horror here hysterical might be insulting, but it’s not my intent. Her stories can take place at a very high pitch, let’s put it that way. The setting in this one seems to be the impoverished white trash South, white trash being one of her specialties. A father suddenly wants to take his 13-year-old daughter shopping for Thanksgiving. He tells her that her mother needs the break. The mother usually does the shopping, but this year she’s not. No explanation—in fact, we never see her at all. The father keeps referring to her as if she’s alive, but she could be dead. The scene at the grocery store is incredible, Oates in high nightmare / dream mode. From the descriptions, it appears the store has been bombed from the air. In one aisle part of the floor is gone with a hole that drops into the basement. It’s chaos everywhere. The lights are low and flickering—there has been a power outage too. There’s lots of spoiled food all over, really disgusting stuff. Yet the place is crowded with shoppers and, while it’s impossible to ignore the inconvenience, no one seems to remark anything about it being unusual. There’s a kind of shared grim determination to get what they need there and get out. It feels like a society rotting out in front of our eyes. In some ways the story feels pro forma—take something comforting like the Thanksgiving holiday and turn it inside out, because there’s no such thing as comfort in this world. The story is built around dysfunctional family dynamics. For at least half of it I was sure it had to be about the mother but it’s actually more about a world in pure collapse. Yes, it goes too far. There are cockroaches, the meat is bad, and they are often up to their ankles in unexplained standing water. Yet everyone acts as if it’s normal. That’s when it feels most like a nightmare. The bland acceptance of this chaos and degradation is what comes to seem the worst. The story has few answers. It leaves us with only more questions. Literally the only thing that seems to matter now is consuming. But what about the bombs? What about the mother? The story works, but it might be overdone. But it works.

Joyce Carol Oates, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
Read story online.

“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.

“The Doll” (1980)

This story by Joyce Carol Oates shows how sharp she can be at creating memorable effects even as she works with staples of horror. Here a professional woman, age 44, president of a private college, is visiting a city she has never been to before, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. She sees what she is certain must have been the model for a dollhouse she had as a girl, a present for her 4th birthday. It was a big dollhouse—36 inches high—and detailed by a craftsman, some distant relative. She has fond memories of the dollhouse and seeing a mansion that looks just like it unsettles her. She stops the car, leaves the key in the ignition and her purse on the front seat, and stands before the house in reverie, trying to decide whether to ring the doorbell and introduce herself. She thinks she must be connected to this family somehow. But she decides to continue on to the conference she is in town for. But later that night she can’t sleep. She’s no stranger to insomnia and decides to pay that call at the mansion after all. This idea alone makes me nervous. It’s after 10 but before 11. She thinks it might not be too late if there are lights on downstairs. What follows is the centerpiece of the story, which seems most likely to be a dream (if you’re looking for the rational explanation here). It moves like a dream, feels like a dream—never easy to do, but Oates pulls it off. She has also calibrated her college president’s point in life, just beyond child-bearing age and never with time for a man. “I am not opposed to marriage for myself, she once said, with unintentional naivete, but it would take so much time to become acquainted, to go out with him, and talk.” The dream explores, at almost shockingly primal levels, how she views herself—as a doll. A simulacrum of a real woman, just as the simulacrum she meets in the mansion is that of a real man (in appearance it looks suspiciously like one of her childhood dolls). Oates’s descriptive language blurs the line and then she lets sharp edges flash out unexpectedly. It’s partly a playtime fantasy with dolls, but the bottom can fall out and leave the abyss on plain view. But the next day she’s up and back at the conference again.

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

Haunted (1994)

I keep meaning to address the subject of duds in story collections and anthologies. I'm so used to finding them in every one I read that I almost suspect it might be a matter of mood and/or just comes with the territory. This is the first collection I've read by Joyce Carol Oates, and it seemed to me almost perfect—nearly every story very good or better, and some, such as the title story, among the best I know. Two other collections of hers I've looked at since don't come close so maybe I had something like beginner's luck here. It does have weaker pieces, and at least one ("The Model") that doesn't seem like horror at all. Oates is very good at writing short stories and seems well aware of the range offered by horror. She includes an afterword specifically on horror that spells it out, as if she is explicitly committing to it. It feels like she can effortlessly access the fears all women know and live with and incorporate them naturally into her stories. They feature ghosts, monsters, haunted houses, serial killers, maybe even a vampire or werewolf or two. But behind all of it are the anxieties of being a woman in this society—taken for granted, fearful of violence, and struggling to be enough. It's not just sexual assault (a given in the worlds of these stories) but all the unfair and conflicting expectations to be strong, nurturing, submissive, and successful, along with the fears of failing to live up to any of these expectations. You can learn a tremendous amount from these stories, I suspect, about what it's like being a woman at the turn of the 21st century. Best of the best here include the title story, which deftly serves up a stew of simmering anxiety from haunted house to serial killer to irrational gnawing guilt and shame, followed by "The Doll," a munge of self-imposed you-can-do-it-all ambition with classic doll story elements done exceptionally well. I also liked seeing Oates dedicate the collection to editor-at-large Ellen Datlow, who I'm just coming to know via her vast production of anthologies over the past 30 years or so. Haunted is remarkably good, not least because the stories, each one, are so consistently so good.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.

"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (1966)

Read story by Joyce Carol Oates online.

It's hard to imagine this strange, disturbing, and wonderfully exhausting story by Joyce Carol Oates coming from any other time than the 1960s—and it's also interesting to note, in passing, how few stories in this survey (only six of 125) are from the tumultuous period. In fact, though this story appears in two of the anthologies I'm looking at, it's the only '60s story in either of them published later than 1964. It's perfectly straightforward about what it is, a story about a girl of 15, coming into her sexuality but still easily manipulated by more experienced adults. Her name is Connie and she is just learning she can break away from her parents and conduct a life of her own. On the day of this story, she has declined to accompany her father, mother, and older sister on a daylong jaunt to the town picnic, which leaves her alone in the house, luxuriating in her freedom and solitude. But before long a car pulls up in the driveway with two strange men who want to talk to her. They are Arnold Friend, who does most of the talking, and Ellie, who listens to a transistor radio held to his ear and occasionally asks alarming questions such as, "You want me to pull out the phone?" They are obviously up to no good and they are bent on luring her out of the house and into their car for a ride. Arnold knows all kinds of things about Connie: her name, that she is alone there for the day, and other details. Very little is explained. We simply follow the strange and persevering conversation as it presses forward. Our minds begin to spin in different directions. Are they going to rape her and turn her out? Is it possible it's all innocent somehow? Except: "You want me to pull out the phone?" Oates herself seemed to have thrill killers in mind, as she said the story was inspired by an Arizona serial killer, Charles Schmid. The story is also dedicated to Bob Dylan, which Oates has said was because of his song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." It's a slightly jarring element in an otherwise nearly flawless story about predators in action—based on imagination more than research, I suspect, which unmoors it slightly. Yet at the same time that makes it more fevered and unnerving. Bob Dylan may have felt right in 1966 but now I think her story belongs more to, say, Roy Orbison. (I'm sure that has everything to do with Smooth Talk, the intriguing 1985 movie version of this story, directed by Joyce Chopra, with Treat Williams and Laura Dern.) I've never got far with attempts to read Oates—I'm not even sure why exactly—but this story is great, gnawingly worrisome to read, provoking anxiety hours and days later. You want to know more about these people, not least what happened. But you never can. It's genuinely haunting.

American Short Story Masterpieces, ed. Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks

The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories, ed. Tobias Wolff

"Kiss on My List" (1981)

76. Daryl Hall & John Oates, "Kiss on My List" (Feb. 14, 1981, #1, 3 wks.)

Hall & Oates had a few hits in the '70s—the sublime "She's Gone," the disquieting "Sara Smile," the execrable "Rich Girl"—before finding their '80s rut with this, a rut they chose to call a groove and go with. Fair enough, I say. It spawned a good handful or more of soundalike hits that all broke the top 10. I'm not necessarily going to begrudge anyone's success on such a basis, though I must admit to getting a little tired of the formula by the time of, say, 1983's "Maneater." Still, this is where it started, and if the song has various barely defensible attractions for me, not least that it acquired an "our song" status in a relationship I recall now with great affection, it also brings other elements I think are harder to deny. It's deceptively alluring, easing into itself with a simple drumbeat and crisp piano chords, before Daryl Hall starts in with his uncanny blue-eyed soul business (I have never figured out exactly what John Oates is supposed to be bringing to the party, but it took me awhile to understand Art Garfunkel's contributions too, so I may yet see the light one day). As the chorus approaches it adds various levels of complexity, and by a little more than a minute in it's more or less fully functioning: its themes, both musical and lyrical, all laid out and on to the elaborations. Yes, you may say that particularly the lyrical are trite, and that may well be so. But if you had known someone whose kiss at that time was on your list of the best things in life, you might feel a little differently about it—a bit more like me, perhaps, who can still find pleasures here to positively wallow in. It's what I'm doing at this very moment. 'Scuse me, need to hear it once more.