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Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque

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The monsters who inhabit the sixteen stories that make up "Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque", by Joyce Carol Oates are not the creatures we typically associate with horror, but more frighteningly are people we encounter daily - husbands, fathers, mothers, and wives. Oates seems to delight in luring us into an innocent and familiar world, filled with people we recognize and trust, then locking the door and cutting off all of the lights. When our eyes adjust to the darkness, what we see and experience is a perversion of the reality we thought we knew.

The stories seem to become increasingly horrific as they go from the first to the last in the collection. It's as if Oates felt obliged to keep raising the stakes; as our sensibilities absorbed the shock of one story, she took us to a new level of terror with the next.

Ms. Oates raises the horror quotient by making her villains people or places we thought we knew. The first story in the collection, "Haunted", centers around the friendship of two twelve-year old girls who live in the country and share a fondness for exploring abandoned places. Ms. Oates captures the feelings of preadolescent angst and hands them back to us effortlessly. Just when we relax and think this is just a coming of age story with an edge, Ms. Oates twists it into a real life horror story with sexual abuse and murder. In "The Doll," a woman's memories of the dollhouse that occupied many hours of her childhood, begin to haunt her when she stumbles on what she believes to be its real-life replica. In "The White Cat", an adoring husband blames the distance growing between he and his young and beautiful wife on her white Persian cat. The cat in this story proves true the adage that cat's have nine lives. Too late, the husband learns he's only got one. We are instantly suspicious of Mr. Starr, the older gentlemen who befriends the young woman in "The Model", in spite of his many acts of kindness. We watch with horror as the young woman, against her better instincts, is drawn into his web. In "Extenuating Circumstances" and "The Guilty Party", Ms. Oates shows us how anger towards the men that abandoned them can turn mothers into monsters. "The Premonition" is aptly named since the horror in that tale is suggested rather than told, felt rather than realized. We watch as a lovely woman and her cheerful daughters, pretend that all is well, while offering shabby excuses regarding the notable absence of the man of the house (who no one - not even the brother who dropped in for a visit - will miss), all the while washing up large pans and knives and tying off large garbage bags. The collection culminates with "Martyrdom", a story so grotesque I truly wish I'd never read it.

Reading "Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque" is an exhausting experience. Ms. Oates gives us, quite adeptly, narratives with themes of betrayal, rape, child abuse and murder. Such themes become tiresome as we come to the end of the collection. But like the onlooker who drives slowly by a grisly accident scene, to catch a glimpse of something he knows he'd rather not see, Ms. Oates writing compels us to keep reading. I couldn't help thinking that like a gansta-rap CD that conveys its message in language some sensibilities can't handle, the book should bear a warning sticker stating "READER BEWARE: NOT FOR THE FAINTHEARTED."

It is a good thing that Ms Oates gives her title "Haunted" a little help; Tales of the Grotesque gives us a more reasonable expectation of the world we are about to enter in this book.. Certainly, most of the characters are haunted by something but these are not ghost stories, cheery and familiar from summer camp. The stories in this book are truly grotesque. At first, I thought that I did not understand Ms Oates' conception of a scary tale. Many of the pieces struck me as odd, bizarre or sad as I read them and often the end popped up before the story seemed ready for it and left me I was puzzled at how quickly a very good idea came to nothing.
There is a hollowness about these people and places that I find disturbing. Passion and longing are documented in many of the stories, notably in Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly , but it is difficult to enter the worlds the author describes. There is certainly enough information but the passion is presented with a numbing dispassion and the characters and situations so grotesque that the reader is denied a structure in which to experience the horror. Extenuating Circumstances is certainly chilling but even though the mother said "Because" at the beginning of every sentence, I just could not completely understand why she chose her particular course of action. More important than my lack of understanding, I couldn't really work up much feeling for it.
Of course it is ghastly to have had a stroke and be at the mercy of disinterested hired help and that this situation is grotesque is hardly controversial but I am confused by the inclusion of The Radio Astronomer in this collection.
The Doll was another story that I enjoyed until I got to the end. This was a terrific idea, worked out very well until the reader is well into the story but I felt a fizzle when it was over. What happened and what was supposed to happen and what was I supposed to bring to the story that I did not or could not offer? On the other hand, The Guilty Party, with the horrible baby, Jocko, was really fun and truly grotesque and absolutely understandable. Clear as a bell.
In this collection, the grotesque is observed and recorded with precision of language in carefully considered stories many of which have, for me at least, an empty, impersonal quality.

Joyce Carol Oates delivers more chills than thrills in her collection of short stories, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. The characters are not natural born killers, but instead ordinary folks-they could be your next-door neighbors. They are unnerving for their familiarity. There's Florence Parr, the respected college professor, Sybil Blake, the innocent teenage girl, and Miss Jessel, the prim and proper governess, to name a few. Oates is skillful at taking an ordinary, even boring character such as these and subjecting her to a somewhat subtle torture chamber of events and psychological connections, eventually leading to a situation where our ordinary heroine (in almost every case, a female) is probably going to murder, but then the story is cut off suddenly, leaving the reader room to wonder. There's the chill. It's all what the reader knows, from a common theme of loneliness in part one, a single story of innocence in part two, stories of endearing human relationships, such as parenthood and marriage gone very wrong in part three, and finally ending with various glimpses of skewed, even futuristic, realities in part four. These stories whisper their incessant questions: What causes any of us to murder? Where's the line between sanity and insanity? How much insanity comes not from us, but from the world? Are we the people we think we are? How do we respond to madness in others? What is beyond our control? Oates gives the reader a delicious sense of What if?

And while these questions do much to spook us and the consistent tilt of reality indeed make us shiver, most of these stories stop short of real tension since the more you read them, the more you can see the ending a mile away. The formula is simple: Here's an ordinary person. Here's an ordinary person with ordinary flaws in an extraordinary situation. The ordinary person is driven to insanity. Any questions? In "The Premonition," Ellen Paxton undergoes this shift from sanity to insanity and enlists her children's help in killing her abusive husband. In the very next story, Julia Matterling of "Phase Change," emerges as a completely different, psychologically off-base woman after enduring her own onslaught of imagined abuse. Similarly, Sybil Blake takes revenge on her estranged father in "The Model." And, the mother in "The Guilty Party" comes to the point where she is ready to murder the man who abandoned her and her baby, Jocko. June Cleaver goes postal. Donna Reed goes on a rampage. There seems to be a desperate stretch for the gruesome-if it's horrible enough, it will be exciting, right? But, in the end, the boringness of repetition wins out over the shock appeal.

Furthermore, many of these stories are biased and hatred-filled in the most overly abused way. In every story (except "The White Cat" which could truly be argued either way), the man is the real villain, with our sympathies directed around the murdering heroine. We're led to believe that murder is the inevitable result of abuse and that abuse is almost always the result of simply being with a man, be it your husband or your estranged lover or the sleazy abortionist or even the demon-possessed two-year-old son. In "Extenuating Circumstances," the very title suggests that the narrator, who has killed her own child, is somehow excused because of the child's father's slighting her: "Because there was shame in it. Loving you knowing you would not love me enough," (148). Perhaps the most objectionable use of this gender-based hatred is seen in the last story, "Martyrdom" in which the husband cruelly sexually abuses his wife. (And may I add that this story seeks to be disgusting just for the point of being disgusting. It's absolutely vile.) It's hard to tell if Oates is genuinely concerned with the position of women in society or if she is simply looking to excuse every criminal act completed by a woman, past, present, or future.

While these stories are well crafted in some respects, bringing the reader to icy depths of character psychoanalysis, they lack in any real variety of plot or situation. While the reader may find them vaguely satisfying on one level, it is not a level most of us want to operate continually, especially for the duration of three hundred and some pages. Their persistent caricature of the abusive man and the revengeful woman is trying, boring, and irritating. In short, I think there's so much better out there to read-why waste your time?

In an average life, the dark and macabre are kept hidden, bottled up, controlled, but in each eerie story of Joyce Carol Oates' Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, there is no such thing as an average life. There is a middle-aged woman, decades later still traumatized by the murder of her childhood friend; a young girl who learns the horrible truth about her parents; an unwed mother driven to an unthinkable act as she fills up the tub with scalding water; a parallel universe where a woman sees horrifying violence committed upon her; a conspicuous Christmas present given to a man by his missing brother's wife; and dolls who walk and function among the living.
In all of these stories, it is best not to become attached to any of the characters; some type of doom awaits them. These are not horror stories of the Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm Street nature where victim after victim meets a gory fate; these stories are about crossing over from the world we define as normal to the world of the perverse. In this world, it's an everyday occurrence for a 39-year-old virgin to decide to be deflowered by a bingo master; for abortions to be punishable by death; for a grocery store to go on with business as usual though the shelves are filled with stinking, rotting goods; for an American girl to be groomed from birth by her parents to be auctioned off in marriage to the highest bidder, a man who will treat her with terrifying cruelty. Rarely do any main characters in these stories die, but they are transferred into a never-ending nightmare from which they will never awake, from which death might even be a blessing.
In some of the stories, there is no definite explanation of what kind of dreadful scene the reader is witnessing, such as what the veterinarian finds so shocking about Poor Bibi that he refuses his owners any service, and whether or not Jocko, the grown man in a two-year-old's body exists, or is just a figment of his mother's imagination, but the hint of something even more grotesque than what has been described is chillingly appropriate, giving readers the opportunity to unleash their imaginations into realms as terrifying as they themselves will allow.

My main complaint with Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque was that the Afterword was not placed in the Foreword position. Had I known beforehand what the author's definition of grotesque was, I would have done much less grumbling while reading. But what I was expecting (raised as I was on the Sherlock Holmes stories, and the works of Poe and Hawthorne) was work that was more suspenseful and hair-raising and less merely bizarre.
During the majority of the time spent reading Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque I found myself wondering whether the author had written these stories as a way to study a genre, as an exercise. While this may be a useful way to develop one's writing skills, in Oates' case it resulted in work that was far too self-conscious. The only time I found myself getting lost in her imagined world was while reading the story Extenuating Circumstances. Perhaps it was precisely because of the limitations (beginning each sentence with "because") that I found it so engrossing, or perhaps it was the unusual use of the second person to tell the story in accusatory fragments. In either case, that story alone held me in thrall.
Mostly, Tales of the Grotesque left me feeling set-up by the title, which didn't live up to its promise in the modern sense of the word grotesque. In her own words, Oates says, "One criterion for horror fiction is that we are compelled to read it swiftly, with a rising sense of dread, and so total a suspension of ordinary skepticism, we inhabit the material without question and virtually as its protagonist." I agree wholeheartedly with this observation, yet save for the aforementioned Extenuating Circumstances, I neither felt that rising sense of dread, nor any suspension of skepticism. My main sensations were disbelief, doubting that the events she describes could happen, and surprise, that an author of Oates' renown and stature would publish such passive, mediocre work under the guise of "horror."
Perhaps in the early seventies, before Stephen King swept the genre clean, this book may have held more sway. I would submit, however, that modern readers are beyond being shocked by such themes as: a parentless child who longs for truth and justice, a lightless world, a disembodied voice, an abandoned house, sexual deviance, childhood dreams revisited, or dolls come to life. At the very least, most readers will surely find themselves above being shocked by such themes as rendered in Oates' particular writing style.
Or perhaps enjoyment of such stories is based on mere stylistic differences, as inherent in and unique to human nature as the things that give us joy. For instance, Oates quotes a scene in Alice in Wonderland that for her remains "the earliest and most horrific image of my childhood." I found it merely laughable. As in the reading of her stories, the quickening just didn't happen, and the most shocking aspect of Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque for me remains the attached blurb that extols it as "...one of the finest collections of short fiction in a long time."

The author's stories are always unsettling, and the fascinating part sometimes is trying to figure out just why you've gotten the creeps so badly. The horrors she writes about are almost never easily definable.

Joyce Carol Oates can tell a story, as she has proved countless times before, but you'd never know it from Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. In this collection of sixteen stories, she's good, as always, at developing the interior of her characters, but most of the stories build to an ending that never delivers. One by one the stories disappointed me. Each time I just knew the next one would be the one to cast the spell, but it never happened.
The story that almost pulled me in was the longest one, "The Model." In it Sybil, a seventeen-year-old orphan, lives with her Aunt Lora who insists on maintaining a complete break with the family's past. Sybil has met a mysterious man who pays her generous fees to model for him; the story continually alludes to a mystery involving her parents, who died tragically. It's a good story-until the ending, which falls flat and leaves the reader feeling, well, deflated.
The other story that tugged at me until the end was "The Premonition," a story of possible murder and family intrigue. Whitney, the younger of two brothers, goes to the house of his older brother Quinn, an alcoholic and abuser. It's a classic scene. Quinn is not there. In the midst of a house that smells of blood and shows all signs of a hasty disinfecting, his wife and daughters are packing to leave, supposedly to join Quinn for a vacation. Unfortunately once again Oates shifts to a vagueness at the end that results in yet another letdown. In fact, becoming indeterminant and fuzzy at the end of the story seems like a formula in the book. When that doesn't work, Oates tries asking the reader a question at the end. Neither is satisfactory.
And it's not just the endings of these stories that don't satisfy. Oates often relies on similar details from story to story, a habit that is distracting to one who reads the stories back to back. Insomnia appears often. So does academia. In at least four of the stories a prominent character is a professor or academic of some sort, usually a professor of English or the Classics. In several stories there is mention of a scholarly paper that is to be read, or heard, at a conference. It's enough to make the reader feel that what we have here is a failure of the imagination. But this is Joyce Carol Oates, so of course it's not that. Is it that the author reveres the scholarly life a little too much and puts it on a pedestal?
Also in story after story Oates pits male against female. It's all passion or no passion at all. Usually the males want control over the females; the women are often plain, awkward, and distant to men-or they're seductive and beautiful. Maybe that's expected for stories of the grotesque, but it becomes too pat. In "The Model," for example, Aunt Lora, unmarried, is "mistrustful or strangers, and particularly of men." In "The Doll" we're told that Florence has no time for men and thus has never taken the time to develop a relationship and marry. And Julia Matterling, of "Phase Change," is a woman who doesn't usually attract men's attention.
At least two stories in the book that break away from the expected are imaginative, but they're also ridiculous: "The Guilty Party" and "Martyrdom." Neither should have made it past the first draft.
I suppose it sounds as if I simply don't like Oates's short stories, but that's not true. I admire her writing style, as well as her ability to handle point of view with variety and believability. I admire stories of hers that don't try so hard to fit into a genre. "Where Are You Going, and Where Have You Been?" is a favorite of mine, and it's far more chilling, far more haunting than any of these "horror" stories.

The problem with Joyce Carol Oates' collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque is not so much banal characterization and transparent plot as it is the inclusion of the germs of several good stories of innately horrifying human experience into a compilation that reeks genre fiction. An abortion is bad enough without setting it, a la Atwood, in "the second year of The Edict." Baby-boiling is bad enough without 117 "becauses." That, and the urge to make margin notes and return the manuscript saying, "Promising first draft, but way over the top."

In the best piece in the collection-the Afterword-Oates says, "One criterion for horror fiction is that we are compelled to read it swiftly, with a rising sense of dread..." Yes'm, swiftly and only once.

Haunted: Tales of The Grotesque
by Joyce Carol Oates

In Joyce Carol Oates' short story collection, Haunted: Tales of The Grotesque (Plume, 1995), torture is the theme. Not just torture for the characters who weave in and out of desire, love, shame and fear, but the reader, too, is pulled into Oates' spell. The story "Extenuating Circumstances," for example, bleeds with a mother's tale about murdering her two-year-old child and her reasons for doing so. Every sentence begins with "Because" and ends with a twisted explanation such as, "Mommy! - Mommy don't!"
Likewise, the story "Poor Bibi," another first person adventure, highlights Oates creativity as she blends passion with justified cruelty: "If he refused his food, or, indeed, gobbled it down in a way disgusting to see, and vomited it, in dribbles, through the house - are we to be blamed for relegating him more and more to the cellar..." Oates guides the reader with a storytelling voice that cannot be refused. The narrator in "Poor Bibi" (with a nonchalant attitude for morbidity) asks, "Were you ever awakened from a deep satisfying sleep to the sound of another's hoarse, strangulated breathing? It isn't a very pleasant experience, I can tell you!"
Oates uses irony in the story, "The White Cat" as she pits a pet against its owner, with detrimental consequences. The socialites Oates portrays in this story enjoy their circle of friends, yet jealousy provokes action. Wryly, Oates provides an ending that satisfies all. Again Oates uses a storytelling style ("Of course," "And then...") to keep the reader hunched close to the page, as if listening for any hint to the story's conclusion.
In both "Accursed Inhabitants of The House of Bly" and "Phase Change", Oates draws the reader into skewed realms of reality and time. Julia, whose dreams bring forth unpredictable circumstances in "Phase Change," is an assistant curator at a private art museum. "Unspeakable" events leave her asking on more than one occasion, "I am not here, then, am I? Or, if here - who?" The torture of "Accursed Inhabitants of The House of Bly" is witnessing the longing the characters have for one another. The longing between the Master's valet and the governess is heightened by the couple's yearning and protectiveness for Flora and Miles, the children in The House of Bly.
"The Premonition" places the element of trust against the backdrop of a family's bond. Whitney drops in unexpectedly to check on his brother's wife and daughters, his own trust in his brother's stability shattered. Whitney's sister-in-law and nieces are so happy to have him stop by for this unannounced holiday visit, with cheery greetings and their "high-pitched, gay, melodic laugh." Suspicion builds as family secrets are threaded into the plot and Whitney's inquires about his brother's whereabouts. Oates describes "an undercurrent of hysteria" as the story unfolds during Whitney's visit.
Even as the reader hopes various characters will spin around in their tracks and head the other way; each story teases until another page is turned. Vulnerability plays against curiosity in stories such as "The Doll," "The Bingo Master" and "The Model." And with Oates gift of story telling, each brings a bittersweet close that leaves the reader tortured enough to want more.

My daughter complained that every literature class she took in college included Joyce Carol Oates, whose writing she found unbearable. Having recently succumbed to a compulsion to discover Oates for myself, I find that "unbearable" is a fair description.

Haunted - Tales of the Grotesque, from 1994, is a collection of those stories you used to tell under blankets at slumber parties, only these ooze with psychology rather than blood. Remember how, just when you were getting to the really nasty part, your mother opened the door and flooded the room with light, saying, "I thought I told you kids to go to sleep in here!" Oates is your mother.

She makes no endings, merely long, long beginnings. Oates gives us no satisfaction of the stake through the vampire's heart or the earth falling onto the live man's coffin. Instead, in "The Model," it takes her forty-five pages to set up lovely young Sybil's decision to accept a ride in Mr. Starr's limousine, where at long last we hope to find out what's going on here, only to sputter to a halt on the forty-sixth page with: "`Yes, Mr. Starr,' Sybil said, and climbed inside."

The end.

Stephen King, modern master of the merchandisable macabre, cannot get the last chapter off his computer before someone is making a movie. Yet here lie sixteen gruesome opportunities in Haunted - Tales of the Grotesque, and Hollywood has yet to call. Imagine a chainsaw massacre film that ends with the sound of a chainsaw at long last starting up in the distance, off camera...or is that Uncle Cyrus's old tractor?

For the most part, Oates' proclivity for end-less stories protects her from evil-minded reviewers who give away the endings. You probably know the ending a few paragraphs after you wade in. "Haunted" tells us early on that Mary Lou is going to be meeting a fearsome fate: "Where Mary Lou's body was eventually found" it was only "the long silky white-blond hair that was identifiable."

The set of stories gives Oates a chance to strut her descriptive stuff, in passages as vomitous as anything in literature. Consider her aging, lab-altered-yet-innocent rat creature - a cross between Frankenstein's monster and Alien - in "Martyrdom": "covered in scabs, maggot-festering little wounds stippling his body, his once-proud tail was gangrenous, the tip rotted away, yet he remained stoic and uncomplaining... eating with his old appetite, the ecstasy of jaws, teeth, intestines, anus, as if the time allotted to him were infinite as his hunger it's certain he would gnaw his way through the entire world and excrete it behind him in piles of moist dark dense little turds."

In her Afterword Ms. Oates declares, "One criterion for horror fiction is that we are compelled to read it swiftly, with a rising sense of dread, and so total a suspension of ordinary skepticism, we can see no way out except to go forward."

But forward to what? Requiring no endings means substituting mysticism for mystery. In "Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly," promoted by the dust jacket as a "macabre reworking" of The Turn of the Screw, Henry James' Miss Jessel and Peter Quint are already dead and damned on page one, Peter Quint sees his former lover as now "a mere cloud of dispersing atoms." In the background, the reader hears, like the "deep guttural urgent rhythmic croaks" of bullfrogs, the mantra of 1990s commerce: Begin with the end in mind.

"Evil is not always repellent," Ms. Oates instructs, "but frequently attractive." It also has the power to nod us off to sleep, just like your mother opening that door.