Shadows of the Evening

"Shadows of the Evening" is a short story by Joyce Carol Oates that appeared in her collection The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque (Dutton, 1998). It was included in the anthology Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (2015).
It tells the story of Magdalena Schön, a shy young woman from Buffalo, New York, who in 1928 goes to live with her wealthy, stroke-ridden great-aunt, Erica Kistenmacher, in Edmundston, Massachusetts. Taking a walk down to lower Edmundston, Magdalena hears and becomes obsessed by a young man with a beautiful voice, singing a hymn over and over in a decrepit church: "Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh… Shadows of the evening steal across the sky."
Oates has described "Shadows of the Evening" as "my Lovecraft story", indicating that it was based on "The Music of Erich Zann":[I]t’s about somebody who hears someone singing at a distance. She hears a voice singing, and she’s drawn out of her house, and goes into the city, and goes into a strange place, maybe like a church, and she discovers who’s singing, so it definitely was evolved from the Lovecraft story.Nightmare, "Interview: Joyce Carol Oates", by The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, June 2016.
==Reception==
A New York Times review of The Collector of Hearts called "Shadows of the Evening" one of "the most striking stories in the collection.... It would be a disservice to this fine story to reveal how adroitly Oates spools together the aunt and the singer, how Magdalena is lost and then saved."The New York Times, "Jellyfish for Dessert Again?" by Margot Livesey, March 7, 1999. Kirkus Reviews called it one of "two superbly imagined and skillfully constructed exercises in psychological horror" in the collection.Kirkus Reviews, "The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque", September 15, 1998.
==References==
Category:Joyce Carol Oates works
Category:Mythos-Inspired Works