Hey there, bookworms. Happy Monday! I hope you’re all well and enjoying the fun and insanity that comes with the holiday season. I know I am! Sleep deprivation is in full swing as I work on some reading, writing, a project at work, shop, and gather with friends for pre-holiday festivities. I’m also starting to look through my reads of the past year to start to put together a list for you guys of some of my favorites for you to check out if you want even more literary recommendations.
Anyway, it’s nothing new that I’m insanely behind on my reviews so I’m going to remedy that now and bring you a long-overdo book review. Let’s talk about Night-Gaunts by the legendary Joyce Carol Oates!
Back in October, one of my friends and I attended a book festival in Morristown, NJ and I was lucky enough to get to sit in on a talk that Oates was giving about her writing and teaching career, and of course, her new collection of short stories, Night-Gaunts.
As an English Major in school, her name was always one I heard in passing, but I never got to read one of her stories. Her work was never part of any of my curriculums and I never got around to any of it in my free time, so with the Halloween season floating in the air, I thought it was the perfect time to read some suspenseful short stories.
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 herself―as 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 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.
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 longing―and asks us to interrogate the intersection of these impulses within ourselves.
I’m glad I got to experience this work, but perhaps I was too pre-occupied with work and life, because this collection is a mere 335 pages, and it took me over a month to read. Each tale she told was clever and intriguing, but I didn’t find myself immersed the way I wanted or expected to be. My interest was piqued when I delved into a few of her plots, and I wondered how anyone could come up with something so dark, twisted, or taboo, but I felt like more than reading the story, I’d rather sit and have a discussion about her thought process or learn more about her writing (aside from the lecture I enjoyed).
If you enjoy a dark read, or short, thrilling pieces from a classic author, I’d say give this a go. This was a good collection that was well-written, but I think I was too distracted to savor the words properly. Maybe I’ll give it another chance another time, because I feel like such a powerful, household name in American Literature deserves more from me.
My Final Rating: three out of five stars
