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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Chilling and insightful, May 17, 2006
Scripture says that the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons. The meaning of this verse is commonly taken to imply the consequences of sinful parenting. For Oates, the sins of the parents are visited on the daughters. Here is an outstanding collection of women and girls of varying ages and circumstances who have in common both a horrible past or current hurt/injury by the one who they should trust the most and the horrible psychological and often sociopathic, violent and self-destructive effects of these hurts. Nabokov explores these themes. What makes Oates' contribution worthwhile is the brevity of the genre and glimpse into each life leaving you wanting to know more. In a sense, we often come across people with such backgrounds and who are severely disturbed as they briefly cross our paths. It is all too common and real. A book worth reading and thinking about.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Mommy held us all night long.", January 6, 2006
One should never assume that the fairer sex is the weaker and in this collection of stories, the prodigious Oates reveals the dark side of a woman's psyche, whether inspired by childhood abandonment or a married woman's rapidly escalating sexual obsession. Flying to the very edge of reason, each of these stories plunges into the darker waters of female behavior, some macabre, some grotesque, others giving voice to the secret impulses that drive women to extremes, to the edge of reason, innocent children taxed beyond the fragile structures of their emotional boundaries. In the first tale, "So Help Me God", a young woman falls in love with a bad boy cop, caught in a web of abuse with the husband she met at fourteen and married at eighteen. The exhilarating sexual energy of their early encounters feels far more dangerous as he toys with her dependency, obsession turning to terror. In "Doll, A Romance of the Mississippi", eerily reminiscent and a cross between "Baby Doll" and Lolita, a young girl travels the Midwest with her (step)father, preying on the sexual fantasies of vulnerable paying customers, frequently betrayed by her own twisted demons, home-schooled from the trunk of their 1953 Buick La Salle. "Madison at Guignol" speaks to a woman's quest for perfection: "But it is my soul I seek continuously, where I can and however." This fashion maven is a victim of her own pathetic hubris, caught in a horror beyond her ability to comprehend. A personal favorite is "Hunger", one of the longer pieces in The Female of the Species. Kristine, the second wife of a wealthy man, begins a casual dalliance with an enigmatic, exotic stranger, Jean-Claude, a new arrival in the elite oceanside community where she is vacationing with her small daughter. In the accepting society of this well-heeled colony, Kristine opens a door she is unable to close, her impulsive romance imbued with the menace of incipient violence, helpless against her consuming passion for the forbidden, en route to a stunning and elaborate betrayal. There are more: "The Banshee"; "The Haunting"; "Tell Me You Forgive Me?"; "The Angel of Death" and "The Angel of Mercy", each with a uniquely bizarre perspective. This collection is fascinating and unsettling, written in the evocative prose that is natural to this author, with random images of threat and menace, birds screeching through the sky, teeming hordes of feral cats, bucolic scenes threaded with nature's unpredictability, the power of one character's preoccupation with another, stalking death, all the ingredients to send a chill up your spine in the dark of the night. Luan Gaines/ 2006.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Stories about Murderous Women, January 8, 2006
Joyce Carol Oates, a writer long fascinated with the macabre, has compiled a solid collection of tales of suspense and violence. These nine stories portray women at their most murderous, motivated by passion, desperation, righteousness, or just plain nastiness. One of the most chilling tales is "Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi," a story about perpetually eleven-year old Doll, a shrewd child prostitute prone to "mean moods." Oates plunges into the psyches of both Doll and her (step)father Ira, exposing the deranged and macabre relationship between the two: what keeps them together and what divides them. "Hunger" is equally memorable, although less for its actual violence than for the way Oates develops the story of a woman hungry for passion. Kristine is vacationing on Cape Cod with her six year old daughter when she meets a mysterious stranger on the beach. When the stranger begins to show up at the upscale parties thrown in Kristine's circle, Kristine finds herself driven to possess him. But her actions have repercussions she does not expect. "The Haunting" focuses on the horrifying hallucinations (or are they?) of a girl whose mother is said to have burned her father alive. The more experimental "Angel of Mercy" entwines the lives of a long-dead, infamous nurse with the youngest nurse of the ward nicknamed "the City of the Damned." "So Help Me God," the story of a woman prompted to take action against her controlling husband after receiving a series of anonymous calls, is less successful, primarily because the motivation Oates provides is more overlaid than deep-seated in the protagonist. Each story is this collection varies enough from the others to keep the reader's attention through one sitting or many. While Oates's characters might not always seem to be capable of the atrocities they commit, the suspense she builds holds everything together. The most engrossing stories have the momentum of inevitability, where both the reader and the characters know where events are heading but from which neither can tear herself away. -- Debbie Lee Wesselmann
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