Praise for Night-Gaunts: “The Woman in the Window” is included in The Best American Mystery Stories 2017
"[A] cutting edge collection...full of rare, believable scenarios that can make the heart race or cause us to ponder our own mortality...Night Gaunts is like a paranoid daydream, yet one where it is satisfying to know that you can awaken with a sounder mind than before it began." ―Bookreporter
"Consummately well-written,stylistically dashing...forthrightly nightmarish" ―Kirkus Reviews
"Oates’ spookiness is visceral, psychologically involving, and socially astute." ―Booklist
Praise for Joyce Carol Oates:
“Few writers better illuminate the mind’s most disturbing corners.”―Seattle Times, “The 10 best mysteries of 2015,” on Jack of Spades
“Oates’s brand of horror has never required the invocation of other worlds: This world is terrible enough for her. Everything she writes, in whatever genre, has an air of dread, because she deals in vulnerabilities and inevitabilities, in the desperate needs that drive people . . . to their fates. A sense of helplessness is the essence of horror, and Oates conveys that feeling as well as any writer around.”―New York Times Book Review, on The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror
“Does any writer around do literary creepy like Joyce Carol Oates? . . . The stories always have an undercurrent of menace poised to break through at any moment.”―St. Louis Post-Dispatch, on The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror
“A dazzling, disturbing tour de force of Gothic suspense.”―Boston Globe, on Evil Eye
“This writer is extraordinary not because she produces such huge amount, but because what she produces is so consistently good. And short stories show her invention, economy and control at its best . . . Oates perfectly captures the atmosphere of fear and well-meaning misunderstanding.”―Times (UK), on High Crime Area
“Oates creates worlds and minds as overwrought and paranoid as anything a female Poe could imagine, then sprinkles her trademark exclamation points licentiously through the interior monologues to heighten the intimacy between ecstasy and madness.”―Kirkus Reviews, on DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
From “The Woman in the Window” What’s the time? Eleven A.M.
He will be late coming to her. Always he is late coming to her.
At the corner of Lexington and Thirty-seventh. Headed south.
The one with the dark fedora, camel’s-hair coat. Whistling thinly through his teeth. Not a tall man though he gives that impression. Not a large man but he won’t give way if there’s another pedestrian in his path.
Excuse me, mister! Look where the hell you’re going.
Doesn’t break his stride. Only partially conscious of his surroundings.
Face shut up tight. Jaws clenched.
Murder rushing to happen.
The woman in the window, he likes to imagine her.
He has stood on the sidewalk three floors below. He has counted the windows of the brownstone. Knows which one is hers.
After dark, the lighted interior reflected against the blind makes of the blind a translucent skin.
When he leaves her. Or, before he comes to her.