num_pages: 335
description: 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 herselfas 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 Hoppers 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 husbands latest conquest? In The Sign of the Beast when a former Sunday school teachers corpse turns up the blighted adolescent she had by turns petted and ridiculed confesses to her murderbut 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 longingand asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves.The woman in the window --The long-legged girl --Sign of the beast --The experimental subject --Walking wounded --Night-gaunts
language: English
title: Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense
publisher: Mysterious Press