Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates Narrated by Xe Sands, Tim Campbell

Overview

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 Hopper's 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 husband's latest conquest? In "The Sign of the Beast," when a former Sunday school teacher's corpse turns up, the blighted adolescent she had by turns petted and ridiculed confesses to her murder-but 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

04/09/2018
The eponymous creatures haunting the Providence, R.I., mansion where the gothic title story is set seem about as terrifying as toddlers draped in bedsheets compared to some of the humans in this unsettling collection from Oates (Beautiful Days). “Sign of the Beast” centers on Mrs. S___, a sadistic Sunday school teacher who both angers and sexually arouses her lumbering, self-conscious student, Howard. In “Walking Wounded,” L___, a 41-year-old cancer patient “eviscerated” by his surgeries, starts stalking a wraithlike young woman—when he’s not fantasizing about chloroform and dumping a body in the local lake. Ghastliest of all, however, are the scientific researchers of “The Experimental Subject,” in which senior technician N___, acting with the enthusiastic backing of his government-funded primate laboratory team, performs an experiment on ungainly undergrad Mary Frances that may raise the hackles of #MeToo supporters. The upsetting journey is in no way redeemed by the slapdash resolution. Oates pushes the boundary between the disturbing and the offensive with mixed results. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)

From the Publisher

Praise for Night-Gaunts:

“The Woman in the Window” is included in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017

"[A] cutting edge collection...full of rare, believable scenarios that can make the heart race or cause us to ponder our own mortality...Night Gaunts is like a paranoid daydream, yet one where it is satisfying to know that you can awaken with a sounder mind than before it began." —Bookreporter

"Consummately well-written,stylistically dashing...forthrightly nightmarish" —Kirkus Reviews

"Oates’ spookiness is visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute." —Booklist

Praise for Joyce Carol Oates:

“Few writers better illuminate the mind’s most disturbing corners.”—Seattle Times, “The 10 best mysteries of 2015,” on Jack of Spades

“Oates’s brand of horror has never required the invocation of other worlds: This world is terrible enough for her. Everything she writes, in whatever genre, has an air of dread, because she deals in vulnerabilities and inevitabilities, in the desperate needs that drive people . . . to their fates. A sense of helplessness is the essence of horror, and Oates conveys that feeling as well as any writer around.”—New York Times Book Review, on The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

“Does any writer around do literary creepy like Joyce Carol Oates? . . . The stories always have an undercurrent of menace poised to break through at any moment.”—St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror

“A dazzling, disturbing tour de force of Gothic suspense.”—Boston Globe, on Evil Eye

“This writer is extraordinary not because she produces such huge amount, but because what she produces is so consistently good. And short stories show her invention, economy and control at its best . . . Oates perfectly captures the atmosphere of fear and well-meaning misunderstanding.”—Times (UK), on High Crime Area

“Oates creates worlds and minds as overwrought and paranoid as anything a female Poe could imagine, then sprinkles her trademark exclamation points licentiously through the interior monologues to heighten the intimacy between ecstasy and madness.”—Kirkus Reviews, on DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

Library Journal

01/01/2018
From a jealous wife's playing Russian roulette with Wedgewood teacups to a visualization of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926: six creepy stories.

Kirkus Reviews

2018-03-20
The latest in Oates' (Beautiful Days, 2018, etc.) vast bibliography further explores the tense dynamic between lust and revulsion that has been the terrain of much of the author's recent work.The characters who wince through this intimate, unrelenting collection are people who live on the periphery of larger lives. We meet a frustrated faculty wife whose identity has been eclipsed by both her husband and his lovely female students ("The Long-Legged Girl"); a teenage boy whose lusts are baffled by the double-speak of an adult world that castigates him even as it draws him in ("Sign of the Beast"); a mistress waiting in doubled yearning and disgust for her brutish lover's arrival ("The Woman in the Window"). A longtime master of the unreliable narrator, Oates lures the reader into compacts with characters whose sympathies turn out to be warped or downright murderous. Is the pitiable L____ in "Walking Wounded" excising snippets of sadist eroticism from a scholar's posthumous work, or is he creating them in his own active life? Is the grown son in the title story the victim of his father's paranoid madness or the inheritor of his infectious damnation? In the most challenging story of the collection, "The Experimental Subject," Oates details the scientific process by which N____, a senior lab technician at a prestigious university, woos the unwitting woman who will gestate the first human/chimpanzee hybrid fetus. N____, who is described as having "the advantage of invisibility that is the particular prerogative of his species: deceptively bland Asian face, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, short-cropped very black glossy hair," chooses the dim, hopelessly naïve Mary Frances for her isolation, her vulnerability, her "stolid mammalian figure," and her coincidental likeness to the chimpanzee sperm donor who fathers her child. It is a fever dream of a story—forthrightly nightmarish—which gleefully transgresses the boundaries of identity politics in favor of the earthiest of human truths, and yet there is very little work done to examine the moral implications of the situation from the other side of those boundaries. As with many of the stories in the collection, "The Experimental Subject" ends in a flurry of unlikely action, signifying not so much character or plot resolution as the author's weariness of the situation in which her characters have been embroiled.Consummately well-written, stylistically dashing, but lacking a commitment to engage with the trickier dilemmas of race, class, and gender Oates uses to motivate her plots.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170186228
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	06/05/2018
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

From “The Woman in the Window”

What’s the time? Eleven A.M.

He will be late coming to her. Always he is late coming to her.

At the corner of Lexington and Thirty-seventh. Headed south.

The one with the dark fedora, camel’s-hair coat. Whistling thinly through his teeth. Not a tall man though he gives that impression. Not a large man but he won’t give way if there’s another pedestrian in his path.

Excuse me, mister! Look where the hell you’re going.

Doesn’t break his stride. Only partially conscious of his surroundings.

Face shut up tight. Jaws clenched.

Murder rushing to happen.

The woman in the window, he likes to imagine her.

He has stood on the sidewalk three floors below. He has counted the windows of the brownstone. Knows which one is hers.

After dark, the lighted interior reflected against the blind makes of the blind a translucent skin.

When he leaves her. Or, before he comes to her.

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