Joyce Carol Oates takes creepy to a whole new level in this unsettling collection of short stories. Oates is an intelligent, concise, and horrifying wordsmith and storyteller. These stories left me with some intense emotional reactions which stayed with me well after I laid the Kindle down and tried to go to sleep. Love can be a very dark and disturbing thing, and a human being can be driven down some long convoluted paths by it. The lucky ones don’t get lost down that road. The people in Oates’ stories are not, unfortunately, lucky.
I have not read any of her work in a long long time. I’m going to have to add her to the list of author’s whose backlist I’ll have to start going through – although the sheer immensity of it is daunting to say the least! According to the wikipedia, over seventy books. That will certainly keep me going for awhile.
