Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

The scariest books don't need blood and gore to give you the shivers. The scariest books toy with your mind. The scariest books tell stories that could really happen—to you, to your friends, to your child. This is one of those books.Joyce Carol Oates is a master at psychological terror, and I think this book, published when she was 80 years old (!!!), proves her extraordinary stature in this genre all over again.There are six short stories in this collection:• A kept woman whose lover, whom she fantasizes about murdering, makes her wait for him nude in high heels;• A professor's wife who is enraged about her husband's affairs with young students and plots a bizarre revenge;• A young boy who is belittled and sexually teased by his Sunday School teacher—something he can never forget…and then she turns up dead;• A friendless, frumpy college girl who is unknowingly recruited for the most unethical, immoral scientific experiment you could ever imagine;• The story of a cancer survivor's return to his small upstate New York hometown and his descent into madness…and then the most horrific and surprising thing happens.• In a salute to horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, the title story of the collection, "Night-Gaunts," is the disturbing story of a child with unusual and vivid night horrors who turns those spectral visions into something else entirely.This book is perfect for a cool autumn night. Just be sure to read it with all the lights on!

The stories remind me of The Twilight Zone television series. At times though they felt incomplete. All in all they each kept my attention, and I am glad I read them. Judge for yourself.

I Usually love short gothic stories by Joyce Carol Oates but a few of these very SO LONG and drawn out that they lost any suspense Better luck next time?

Joyce Carol Oates has once again written an amazing book of short stories. I could not put it down and read it in a day. Well done.

Oates nails me to my seat every time!

Beautifully written. But a grim little collection none the less.

A+

Night-Gaunts and other Stories is a short collection of six previously published works that at their best not just get inside the characters’ minds, but in their skins, where Oates finds things hidden, secret, unknown. Death, sex, loneliness, estrangement, separateness are all concepts that are strewn throughout this collection. There’s an oddness to some of these prose pieces as if you are walking into the middle of someone’s story. Often, Oates doesn’t fully resolve things,leaving the reader to wonder. And, in many of these pieces, the problem of the unreliable narrator looms large, particularly when the narration is a character’s thoughts. I will discuss only a few of these tales.The first story in this six-pack short story collection also appeared in Lawrence Block’s collection of stories by various writers of Edward Hopper paintings (Sunlight or in Shadow). Oates takes the painting “Eleven AM” and turns it into an -depth portrait of the inner stream-of-conscious thoughts of a woman who sits in the chair by the window each day wearing only heels 👠 waiting for the man she is the mistress of, musing about their relationship and how she ended up here. Beautifully written, poetic prose, catching but a moment in Time. Very evocative and complex, though not in a traditional format.The Long Legged Girl has a similar inner thought format rather than a traditional story format. A jealous wife, a college professor, his young blonde protege. The wife’s frustrations spilling out. The thoughts cascading through her mind. Or is it all just in her head?The Sign of the Beast is a story about childhood, infatuation, religion, obsession, bullying, mental difficulties, and outsider status. It is once again narrated through the eyes of one character - a student in Sunday school who is fascinated by his teacher -or is she flirting?The Experimental Subject is almost weird and offbeat, touching on subjects of sex, race, fetishisms, beasts, unattractiveness, naïveté, and using people. It’s a really odd story that will make the reader a little uncomfortable.And that’s all before we get to the Lovecraftian world.

This collection of tales by Joyce Carol Oates have all been previously published in various places, and so it is great to have them all together in one edition, for our perusal. Before the actual tales we also have H P Lovecraft’s poem Night-Gaunts, which is also the title of the last of the six stories that we have here, and a homage to the great man himself.Those who are familiar with Oates’s works will know that you never really know what you are going to get, as she can change the way things are going in just one sentence, so here we have tales that we do not know the ultimate ending of as they are left at a place where we have to use our imagination to work out what will happen next.With a woman sitting naked in an apartment that she cannot afford by herself, she is awaiting the arrival of her lover. As we read this, we see that both she and the man she is waiting for have something more on their minds than just a liaison. We meet a woman with murder on her mind, as she sits and drinks tea with the student, she believes her husband is currently sleeping with. With an experiment to try and create a hybrid creature, so we see what happens when ethics are broken and the unfettered ambitions of a professor are allowed to proceed, but what will the eventual outcome be?With a boy becoming somewhat infatuated and obsessed with his Sunday School teacher, an author dying from cancer having to struggle through another author’s work to prepare it for printing, and then the weird story Night-Gaunts, this has more than enough to hold your attention and curiosity. Exceptionally well written as you would expect, there is a bit of something for anyone who likes things a bit more gothic, a bit darker, and certainly a bit weirder than most people. One thing I would caution anyone getting this to beware of though, that if you read all the stories back to back it can be a bit of an overload, and so it is perhaps best to read one or two at a time. These stories will certainly give you more than enough food for thought as we are reminded of the various elements that make up what it is to be human.

I enjoyed every story in this collection. I’ve already read the opening story, The Woman in the Window in the anthology In Sunlight or in Shadow: Stories Inspired by the Paintings of Edward Hopper which I got from NetGalley, This is a great story with unsettling and sinister undertones. I’ve also read Sign of the Beast which I borrowed from Prime Reading a few months ago. It was a pleasure to read these stories again. My favourite of the remaining three was The Experimental Subject which unsettled me with its sinister use of science and some very dark moments. This one made my flesh crawl. Night-Gaunts, the title story is also fantastic, dark, sinister and a little poisonous. The weakest story is Walking Wounded but it’s still enjoyable just not as strong as the other tales.

Far from being suspenseful, I found he stories trite and unmemorable. They also felt very much like the plotlines were lifted from other books.