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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Reader Beware, April 16, 2002
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."
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
More Chills Than Thrills, January 5, 2002
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?
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Keeping Her End in Mind, December 14, 2001
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.
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