Rating: 
Summary: Short Stories of Uninteresting characters
Review: The short stories are unbeliveble and the characters unsympathetic. You end each story thinking "who cares?"
Rating: 
Summary: A Cold and Lonely Place
Review: The title of this book is quite appropriate: it is both haunting and grotesque. I read it a few years ago and could not put it down. I found the atmosphere of this book in whole to be one of a dark wintery place that chills your insides and leaves you feeling alone and isolated. Not a place a lot of people like to visit, but I was mesmerized. The deeper I got into this book the more distant I felt from reality. When I was forced to put the book down and return to the world as we know it, some icy slivers remained. One story in particular - "Thanksgiving" - stuck with me the longest. A father and daughter go to the grocery store to buy food for Thanksgiving. A nice bonding experience for parent and child, right? A celebration of family togetherness and warmth during the holdiays, right? Hardly! Joyce turns this simple task into a creepy, apocalyptic nightmare. It took quite some time before I could shake the feeling of the story each time I went grocery shopping. Burrrrr......... All in all, it is one freaky trip and you'll be relieved when you get back home. Just don't forget your mittens.
Rating: 
Summary: Solid but inconsistent collection of JCO's dark side...
Review: There are dozens of reviews here, so I'll tell you about my two favorite short stories and what I don't like about Oates, and you decide.
My two favorite books in this solid but inconsistent collection are "The Premonition" and especially "Thanksgiving."
"The Premonition": Whitney learns that his abusive brother Quinn has started drinking again, so shortly before Christmas he decides to check in with Quinn's wife and daughters to make sure they're alright. Without resorting to any cheap gimics or even spelling out for the reader exactly what's going on, Oates slowly builds a tension that can cut with a knife; a truly haunting story.
"Thanksgiving": By far my favorite story in the book. The young narrator's mother is sick, so she accompanies her father to the supermarket to buy food for the meal. Oates turns this ordinary setup into one of the most disturbing, carvinalesque nightmares I've ever read; a story that stayed with me for weeks afterward.
Fans of Clive Barker or Stephen King might find a limited payoff to JCO's stories -- instead of outright shocking the reader her stories typically lull them into an almost hypnotic sort of dread. She's a master storyteller and re-reading many of the stories in "Haunted," it's interesting to find the subtle clues and language play that Oates will use to trigger fear in her reader.
The two things that I found frustrating about this book: JCO often rights in the first person, and her narrators have a tendency to all come off as the same souless, damaged person. And second, JCO is clearly a writer in command of her craft, but sometimes she gets a little too clever for her own good and her writing style occassionally slips into an inappropriate pretentiousness. These are habits I've noticed in a LOT of Oates writing, so if you're a fan and it doesn't bother you already, maybe it's just me.
Overall though, you could do a lot worse than to start with this collection, or the (in my opinion) superior followup, "The Collector of Hearts: More Tales of the Grotesque."
Rating: 
Summary: Haunted? Not so sure about that...
Review: This collection of Oates' stories is wrapped in a book cover colored red and black with the word "haunted" in all capital letters and a creepy font running the width of the book. With the mood caused by the cover, one would think that these stories would match that vibe. For me, they fall short.
Joyce Carol Oates is a fine writer. Her style and her ability to manipulate words and tell a story is superb. While I did enjoy this collection, it got long. The stories begin to seem more and more like carbon copies of each other, unable to sustain a reader for 300 pages.
I think the subtitle is perhaps the better description of the stories; "grotesque." The stories are eerie. They are not the normal things we think about. They are not about the normal things we do, but they are about the things that we come across every day - in magazines, on the news, and on television.
People say "fact is stranger than fiction," and I think that is what Oates might be trying to show us through this collection. While these stories all seem more unlikely than real, they could happen. And it is probably possible to say, safely, that similar things have happened.
I'm not saying these are bad stories. They will stick with you. They will invade your mind, and leave you with visuals that you will not soon forget.
The story "Extenuating Circumstances" specifically got to me. The story is about a mother who is rather off, and does what she thinks she has to do to rid herself of the burden that is her child. The narrator of the story, who starts each paragraph with "because," is punishing everyone and killing this child out of what she believes is love. Because, as she says, "love hurts so bad."
To go back today and watch a film like "The Amityville Horror" is silly if you want to be scared. It is cheesy. It doesn't seem real. Even more so, I think, a haunted house is something we've seen before. I think that this is what happens with this book. We've seen these things before. Whether it be a woman who sees a house that looks like her old doll house, or a young girl who unsuspectingly develops a relationship with her estranged father, these are familiar plots.
The strength of this book, though, might be the simplicity. Perhaps I missed it all entirely. I think that it is fair to say that sensationalism has numbed the twenty-something American. We're used to huge explosions and blood. To be scared, I believe, we must feel that our own personal well being is at stake. Not once is this so in this collection.
Perhaps that is what is grotesque. That consideration for the everyday eeriness in the lives of others isn't enough to make me afraid.
Rating:
Summary: Haunted? Not so sure about that...
Review: This collection of Oates' stories is wrapped in a book cover colored red and black with the word "haunted" in all capital letters and a creepy font running the width of the book. With the mood caused by the cover, one would think that these stories would match that vibe. For me, they fall short.
Joyce Carol Oates is a fine writer. Her style and her ability to manipulate words and tell a story is superb. While I did enjoy this collection, it got long. The stories begin to seem more and more like carbon copies of each other, unable to sustain a reader for 300 pages.
I think the subtitle is perhaps the better description of the stories; "grotesque." The stories are eerie. They are not the normal things we think about. They are not about the normal things we do, but they are about the things that we come across every day - in magazines, on the news, and on television.
People say "fact is stranger than fiction," and I think that is what Oates might be trying to show us through this collection. While these stories all seem more unlikely than real, they could happen. And it is probably possible to say, safely, that similar things have happened.
I'm not saying these are bad stories. They will stick with you. They will invade your mind, and leave you with visuals that you will not soon forget.
The story "Extenuating Circumstances" specifically got to me. The story is about a mother who is rather off, and does what she thinks she has to do to rid herself of the burden that is her child. The narrator of the story, who starts each paragraph with "because," is punishing everyone and killing this child out of what she believes is love. Because, as she says, "love hurts so bad."
To go back today and watch a film like "The Amityville Horror" is silly if you want to be scared. It is cheesy. It doesn't seem real. Even more so, I think, a haunted house is something we've seen before. I think that this is what happens with this book. We've seen these things before. Whether it be a woman who sees a house that looks like her old doll house, or a young girl who unsuspectingly develops a relationship with her estranged father, these are familiar plots.
The strength of this book, though, might be the simplicity. Perhaps I missed it all entirely. I think that it is fair to say that sensationalism has numbed the twenty-something American. We're used to huge explosions and blood. To be scared, I believe, we must feel that our own personal well being is at stake. Not once is this so in this collection.
Perhaps that is what is grotesque. That consideration for the everyday eeriness in the lives of others isn't enough to make me afraid.
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