Thank you Netgalley for my free copy of this book!

This is a really interesting set of short stories. I particularly like the connection between certain stories, reminding me how Stephen King mentions certain characters in numerous books. While some shorts are better than others, my absolute favorite was The Experimental Subject. It is one of the weirdest and most memorable short stories I will ever read... I wish it was a full-length book!!!

There is nothing that Carol Oates writes that isn’t good. These six (long) short stories are no exception. Themes of creativity and mental illness run through them; a couple have writers as main characters (and libraries); the terror when fantasy and reality, fiction and life (which is what libraries represent), mingle and become impossible to distinguish. One of the stories is inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting ‘Eleven A.M., 1926,’ another is a rendition of HP Lovecroft’s life, echoing and incorporating his demons and style/genre. (I personally liked ‘The Experimental Subject’ best – the longest story in the book – She has such brilliant titles too!). Carol Oates captures a destabilising tension and danger under the stillness, silence and withdrawal from reality of her main characters. Nameless protagonists, whose names are not their names or are allocated with a letter. Half formed (emotionally and socially lacking) and suffering. These stories linked and snuggle in well together; numbers, birthmarks, sin and betrayal connect to her characters psychological imbalance. I was sucked deeply into all of these stories; the open-ended finales leave you bubbling with thought and working for their conclusion. Very clever and so much fun!

Night-Gaunts and other Stories is a short collection of six short stories that sort of entire a person's life at the highlight of a situation that is going to change everything. The whole collection itself has a night-like feel - the period from sunset to sunrise. A lot can happen between sunset and sunrise (including a literal dawning of a new day) and with each story we see a character in the midst of some routine - sometimes mundane - that has been a part of their lives for a long time. Throughout each piece we get to know about the "greivance" that has dominated everything they do and how their obsessions or delusions have kept them stable. The real suspense kicks in when the characters are experiencing an event, a thought, a new happening that has slowly, yet completely, consumed them and everything they do. We, as the reader, see some form of deterioration of mind as we try to navigate the reason, the morality and the justness of their actions. many, if not all, of these stories feel unresolved,leaving us to question if we can believe everything before and wonder what could've possibly happened next.

It is a examination of the human condition and the work of the mind in situations (given the circumstances) that become catalysts for erratic behaviour. My review isn't necessarily about whether I liked or disliked it but rather how intrigued I was by each individual story in which you leave with more questions than answers. My personal favourites happened o be the first 3:

“Eleven AM” 4.5 stars

Follows the inner thoughts of a woman who sits in the chair by the window each day wearing only heels waiting for the man she is the mistress of, mulling over the intricacies of their relationship, how she ended up here and her desire to eventually get out of this situation - even if she has to kill him.

"The Long Legged Girl" 4.5 stars

A jealous wife who feels unfulfilled, dejected and unwanted decides to play a game of Russian Roulette with a "tea date" that she's having with one of her husband's college students that she is sure he is sleeping with. Her thoughts and the resulting madness keeps flooding her mind and we are left to wonder if it's all just in her head.

"The Sign of the Beast" 4 stars
This is a story about childhood, infatuation, religion, obsession, bullying, mental difficulties, and outsider status. It follows a young boy who is convinced his Sunday School teacher has a mean-spirited - and maybe(?) sexual - obsession with him. When she's found dead, he's also convinced he killed her... But did he?

--

As for the rest of the stories:

- "The Expiremental Subject" 2.5 star

Note: It's one of the harder stories to read.

- "Walking Wounded" 3.5 stars

- "Night-Gaunts" 3 stars

Note: An ode to H.P. Lovecraft

Thank you to NetGalley and Joyce Carol Oates for allowing me to read and review Night-Gaunts. All I can say is that it was fabulous. Read it!

It's something of a cliche to say that Joyce Carole Oates is a phenomenon, but even the quickest glance at the sheer quantity and quality of her work will reveal just how tall she stands in the literary world. I've loved and/or admired her writing since reading the short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been some forty years ago. Even the work that doesn't quite hit the mark resonates with her ability to get inside the minds of her characters and, equally, get inside the minds of her readers.
For me this collection starts off brilliantly, then starts to trail off in its latter sections. The stories The Woman in the Window, The Long-legged Girl and Sign of the Beast are as good as it gets in terms of any type of Gothic tale; the ghost of Edgar Allen Poe remains very close indeed.
Then we come to The Experimental Subject, close to novella length I'd say, and easily even better than the aforementioned tales. The development of the relationship between the protagonists and of the insidious (pseudo-) scientific plot on Mary Francis is stunning; it would be a very hard-hearted reader indeed who wouldn't be fearing the worst for what was to come. So for almost the entire length of this story there is a hugely growing feeling of dread which is - in my very humble opinion - spoiled by the fact that the ending comes abruptly and almost (Oates is too fine a writer not to plant strange/odd/unexpected developments) out of nowhere. I won't write any spoilers but I do have to be honest and say that the way the story resolves (or doesn't - you're not getting any hints from me!) left me high and dry, wanting and expecting a hell of a lot more. I'm not the type of reader who expects stories to be neat and follow any kind of pattern - all I'll say is that Oates has written here one of her most gripping tales in a long time but it ultimately refuses to be true to its many promises. Maybe this is too harsh a reading - I've been interested to read what others have written in their reviews, and I seem to be alone in this thought.
The final two stories, for me, either suffered for the let-down I felt from The Experimental Subject, or just failed to quite hit the mark. Walking Wounded failed to connect with me (still a fine piece of writing) and the title story, while quite creepy and full of Oates' trademark flair, still left me feeling quite flat.
Not a fully inspired collection, but with far more positives than negatives, and still worth a considered look.

As a long-time fan of Joyce Carol Oates, I was particularly anxious to read this new collection of short stories. Ms. Oates has a style of writing that, in my view, is virtually unique and while I have preferred some of her works over others, I have never been disappointed by any of her books. This collection is no exception. Billed as “tales of suspense”, these six short stories run the gamut from mildly suspenseful to excruciatingly so.
The Woman in the Window is a story evolving from the image of the Edward Hopper painting, using the premise of a single working class woman rapidly approaching middle age and the minute-to-minute changes in her perceptions of and feelings for her rather boorish, inconsiderate and well-to-do married lover as she waits in her window for his sporadic visits. It is the story of a failing relationship between two people whose original motives and reasons for the arrangement have been lost over time and the reader becomes increasingly aware of the unconscious hatred and potential for violence hidden in these two hearts.
In The Long-Legged Girl, the middle-aged wife of an aging college music professor approaches the end of her years of tolerance of her husband’s infidelities with his students, although the reader can’t be sure if these are actual or just something she is imagining as their marriage slowly disintegrates. She focuses her attentions on one particularly attractive student and this focus becomes an obsession.
Sign of the Beast is the only story in the collection that can be considered an actual mystery, of sorts. The story revolves around the charged relationship between a physically awkward 12-year-old farm boy and his female Sunday school teacher towards him. As with so many of Oates’s characters, the reader must decide how much of the behavior and actions of one character are real versus being skewed by the perceptions of the other person. Several years go by and the boy’s obsession with the teacher grows. The mystery involves a death – was it murder? – and the question of guilt or innocence.
The Experimental Subject is a stunning story involving a scientific experiment that is entirely within the realm of possibility. The main characters are Nathaniel, a thirty-something Asian research assistant, and Mary Frances, a 20-year-old student and the bizarre and serpentine path of their relationship. Too many details would constitute spoilers and that is to be avoided at all costs, because this is a truly engrossing and mind-blowing story, with a truly remarkable ending. This story is so riveting that I am actually considering writing to the author asking her to write a follow-up story with these remarkable characters.
Walking Wounded tells of a man, physically and mentally devastated by major surgeries, returning to his home town. As in other Oates stories, the line between what is real and what is in the mind of the protagonist is for the reader to uncover and decide.
Night-Gaunts, the title story, relates the tortured and lonely childhood of Horace Phineas Love, Jr., as he grows into an equally tortured and lonely adult, obsessed with arcane writings and the appearance in his life of the “night-gaunts” that have haunted him since childhood.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough, for both the faithful fans of Joyce Carol Oates and for those unfamiliar with the works of this author.

Joyce Carol Oates is a literary powerhouse. A recurring theme in her work is the abuse of women: “Do With Me What You Will,” 1973, “We Were the Mulvaneys,” 2002, “The Gravedigger's Daughter,” 2007, “Blonde: A Novel, 2009,” “The Sacrifice”, 2016. I have read them all. Oates is a favorite author of mine. I admit that when I read her memoir, “A Widow’s Story,” 2001, I was surprised to see how very normal her marriage was (her husband, Raymond Smith, is deceased) and how ordinary her life is. Like most wives, she used to share with her husband moments of her daily life. For Oates, this was about her 36 years as a professor in Princeton’s University creative writing program, where she was nicknamed dark lady of fiction. She would chat with him regarding her lecture traveling schedule so they could coordinate their dates. “Widow” is filled with the pros and cons of a typical long-term (almost 50 year) marriage. How lost, angry and disoriented she felt after the death of her husband. I assumed incorrectly that her grief would be atypical and written with a screaming evil rage as if it were one of her novels. But it was simply Oates, writing as any other woman would to describe their feelings after the loss of a spouse. I chose to begin my review of Oates’ “Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense" with the above summarization because all in the collection are, as the title suggests, dark. In this book, there are six previously published stories. All characters are written with a piercing, uncomfortable clarity that will terrify the reader more than once.

“The Woman in the Window” was inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting titled “Eleven A.M., 1926.” Oates’ imagination turns a lovely and demure painting of female sexuality into a tale of suspense. We meet a naked woman, sitting in a window of her home, waiting for her married lover, where the time is always 11a.m., because that is when he will arrive. She is never naked for he feels that naked is a coarse word. She is always nude, his preferred word over naked. She wears only a pair of high-heeled shoes. After years of this arrangement, both of them have begun to despise each other for different reasons. Their two points of views are woven into a story-line that revolves around sex and violence. (The rest of this review is a potential spoiler.) This taunt story had me biting my fingernails wondering who would kill and who would be killed. But then, I began to I wonder if Oates was playing with her readers. How could anything happen when it is always 11a.m. He hasn’t even arrived yet. Damn the author is good. But these are my thoughts. You will have to read the story yourself to make your own conclusions.

In, "The Long Legged Girl" Oates writes about a middle-aged housewife of a college professor. They live in a house on or near campus in a college town that reads like a map of Princeton University. She is an understandably jealous wife since “her husband might be distracted by a girl—or two, or three—but after graduation the girls disappeared.” And frankly, in her younger years, she was busy with the children and her own career as a food writer that she was glad to have her husband out of her hair for awhile. But, now that she has time on her hands and age has seriously tainted her appearance, well what woman could fault her jealousy. She believes a certain long-legged girl is her husband’s latest interest. And this one is especially pretty. “A girl with long straight silver-blonde hair that fell past her shoulders, a perfect patrician profile, gray-green eyes…who’s skintight jeans curved down at her impossibly narrow hips.” For these reasons, she doesn’t feel that any seasoned married woman would point a finger at her for inviting the girl over for an afternoon tea, with the intentions of turning the teacups into a game of Russian roulette. The reader is aware of the bizarre game early on. I imagine that in the hands of a lesser author that the story might lose its punch. How many pages do you want to read speculating which one will drink the poison in the delicate Wedgewood teacups? But this story’s suspense is not about who lives and who dies. The story’s complexity is how the author gets the reader to lose themselves inside of the wife’s insanity. She appears to have lived a normal life. When did her mind snap? Or, was she always unstable? It is nerve wrecking to read this one alone, at night, when your own brain is tired and vulnerable to confused thoughts. You may find yourself questioning your own mental health.

For me, out of all in this collection, “The Experimental Subject” is the most unsettling. First, there is abuse against chimpanzees, which is disturbing. Then there is the mental and physical abuse against the main female character, which is heartbreaking. The reader will meet a male Professor and his male Senior Technician in a government-funded primate laboratory. The heroine is an unattractive, friendless college girl with a family who wants no part of her. It is not a spoiler when I mention that there is something unethical in this experiment, something unholy. The first paragraph begins with “She was a solid-bodied female of perhaps twenty years of age with a plain face, an unusually low, simian brow, small squinting eyes…full bosom of an older woman, thick muscled thighs and legs, thick ankles…and a center of gravity in the pelvic region.” In the next paragraph, we meet this lonely girl as she enters the professor’s lecture hall. The technician sights her and is certain that she is a good candidate for the experiment. He befriends her and she begins to shine for the first time in her life. She falls in love with the technician and believes that he also loves her. But then the experiment begins causing her life to be in danger. Now, I have to stop or it will become a spoiler. This is a truly unique and bone chilling tale.

Not all of the stories were as thought provoking as the ones I chose to review. I didn’t find the title story, Night-Gaunts, as a stellar read. For reasons I can’t explain, its elements of a haunted house just lost me. Still, there is no denying Oates’ enormous talent. She manages to turn a thriller novel into a piece of literary fiction. Oates has been criticized for writing female characters with masochistic traits. It has been noted that there is a lack of strong, independent female role models in her fiction. In 1981, Oates wrote an essay titled “Why is your writing so violent?” In it, she comments that she finds that question always insulting, always ignorant, and always sexist. Oates feels that “rape and murder fall within the exclusive province of the male writer, just as, generally, they fall within the exclusive province of male action.” She points out that, “in fact, my writing isn't usually explicitly violent, but deals, most of the time, with the phenomenon of violence and its aftermath.” I believe the tales in “Night Gaunts” prove her point. To understand why that question is so insulting to the world famous American writer, I suggest that you remember her words while you read this book. She gets inside her characters’ psyches, and the reader learns of their hidden unknowns. If you look carefully, you may also find what you keep hidden about yourself. Oates will make you squirm. She forces you to look at your own sexual desires, your own feelings of loneliness, and your own death. These are the musings that will panic you more than any ghost story.

ARC for review - expected publication date June 15, 2018.

A quick read of six more of Oates's gothic tales. One I had already read as Amazon published it as a Kindle Single ("The Sign of the Beast") and all seemed very similar in tone, save one and that's the one I truly enjoyed - Oates delved deeply into some scientific research and away from haunts for a bit - it was so unlike her I think that's why I enjoyed "The Experimental Subject" so much....quite a departure from the other stories in the volume.

But, overall, it's Oates doing what she does best (other than churning out work at a remarkable rate of speed), writing vaguely unsettling stories that are often not quite resolved and that's always for the good. Fans will enjoy.

Sometimes, the prolific Joyce Carol Oates hits a mark and sometimes she just doesn't stick the landing. Oates is capable of much better than this lukewarm collection.

I am not a fan of short stories and I have never read Joyce Carol Oates before, so the fact that I enjoyed this book as much as I did came at a complete surprise to me. She has the power to transport you to the setting of her stories in just a few sentences yet, they linger long after you finish. These are stories of suspense, and I can understand now why she is considered a master of the genre. This may have been my introduction to a beloved author but it will definitely not be my last devouring of her talent.

I loved this book! It had an excellent selection of suspenseful short stories. I was never bored, each story was so well written and had me engaged from the first word... every time! So so worth the read!

i'm sorry to say that i was very disappointed in all but one of these stories. touted as "tales of suspense" i actually thought each story quite bland and struggled through finishing most of them. the lone standout was 'the experimental subject'. though i didn't find it very suspenseful, i did find it an excellent character study and exploration of relationships. only the inclusion of this story raises this title from zero or one star.

two out of five stars

Six short stories, all of which were as enjoyable as each other. I found them to be beautifully written and intriguing!

Long ago I tried Oates’ Zombie, which for genre fans, has about as much to do with the great undead as Cranberries’ Zombie, and unlike the latter (RIP Dolores O’Riordan, so sad) wasn’t particularly good either. So for the longest time that was my Oates experience and I wasn’t looking to repeat it, but something about this anthology attracted me…was it the title? was it the second chance spirit? Who knows. At any rate I’m very glad to have read it, because these stories were good, great and even exceptional and, as far as second chances go, an absolutely redeeming one. Of course, I’m now a more mature and versatile reader and tastes do change no matter what anyone tells you, so maybe I’m just more in a place to appreciate the author. Night Gaunts is haunting, mesmerizing, hypnotic, it’s a quality of Oates’ writing, the psychological insight, the expertly crafted atmosphere. The collection drew me in from the very first story, reminiscent of a David J. Schow’s tale in the similar vein of a love affair where you really, really don’t want to know what the other person is thinking, because if you did, you’d get away as far and as fast as you can. And from there on the book just holds attention not quite like a tight hug, more like a staggeringly disturbing scene one cannot look away from, reaching a sort of emotional crescendo with the tale of an experiment gone off the rails. Seems, as this review will certainly attest to, that titles don’t stick in my memory, but plots do and this collection features some very memorable ones. In all fairness the later stories didn’t quite wow me as much, but were still very good, ending with the eponymous one no fan of genre classic ought to miss out on, a very clever biographical reimagining set in Providence, that’s it, think cosmic, think Night Gaunts. While that might be the only story definitively horrific, the rest are scary in their own way, specifically the darkly psychological one, my favorite. Terrific tales of terrible things (as the alliteration addict might add). Disquieting, fascinating, thrilling, so well written and strange in all the best ways…these stories were a great read. So glad to have comes across this book. Thanks Netgalley.

My first Joyce Carol Oates, and it immediately becomes clear why this woman is a much-lauded writer: She is a master of psychological exploration, and her unsettling storylines are prowling forward while there is always something boiling below the surface, something the reader can’t quite pin down and that is only slowly and never completely revealed.

This collection consists of six short stories that have already been published separately between 2015 and 2017. Here’s a quick overview to show you what we’re dealing with:

- “The Woman in the Window” was inspired by Edward Hopper’s painting “11 A.M.”: A naked woman is waiting for her married lover, both of them have by now begun to despise each other. Oates paints a fascinating picture of their contradictory and changing feelings – great stuff.

- “The Long-Legged Girl”: Russian roulette in the times of the Opioid epidemic: The wife of a professor invites a student whom she suspects to have an affair with her husband and serves tea – one of their cups is poisoned with a mix of medications. For me, the real suspense lay in witnessing the inner workings of the mind of the murderous wife: Is she neurotic? Is she insane? Where did her life go wrong and what was her responsibility?

- “Sign of the Beast”: This story does not really tell us what happened here, which is the whole genius of it: Did the (female!) Sunday school teacher not only pick on, but also sexually harass her students? Did the protagonist kill her? And if not, why did he confess to it?

- “The Experimental Subject”: A research technician in a Life Sciences lab helps a professor and his team of scientists to conduct an unethical (and this is very mildly put) experiment on a woman without her knowledge. Will his psychologically marred personality really make him go through with this? Frankly, this is pretty sick and I was absolutely disgusted, but still I could not put this story down (partly because I am pretty sure that similar experiments are probably conducted somewhere, if not under the same, rather improbable circumstances). Warning: Also contains violence against animals (and yes, this is a clue).

- “Walking Wounded”: A middle-aged man has to undergo a severe operation for cancer and can’t deal with the fact that he is now a permanently handicapped person – but who killed the woman at the lake, he himself (because he thinks he can't get a woman in a normal way anymore) or the dead historian whose manuscript he is completing? While the psychological repercussions of illness are a highly interesting and really scary topic (as it can happen to all of us, and quick), I found this to be the weakest story, because it was pretty confusing (at least for me).

- “Night-Gaunts” is an ode to the fantastic H.P. Lovecraft: The man invented fictional creatures named “nightgaunts” which were inspired by his childhood nightmares. Oates takes these creatures and puts them into a shortened, vignette-like re-telling of Lovecraft’s life.

All in all, a nice collection that really makes me want to read more Joyce Carol Oates.

No-one does poisonous little tales like JCO! Weaving together strands of love, sex, desire and death, she works in liminal spaces where nothing is ever what it seems. Exquisite, clever writing, and with intellectual heft intertwined with something uneasy glimpsed in the corner of the eye, this is unsettling fiction.

Night-Gaunts and other Stories is a short collection of six previously published works that at their best not just get inside the characters’ minds, but in their skins, where Oates finds things hidden, secret, unknown. Death, sex, loneliness, estrangement, separateness are all concepts that are strewn throughout this collection. There’s an oddness to some of these prose pieces as if you are walking into the middle of someone’s story. Often, Oates doesn’t fully resolve things,leaving the reader to wonder. And, in many of these pieces, the problem of the unreliable narrator looms large, particularly when the narration is a character’s thoughts. I will discuss only a few of these tales.

The first story in this six-pack short story collection also appeared in Lawrence Block’s collection of stories by various writers of Edward Hopper paintings (Sunlight or in Shadow). Oates takes the painting “Eleven AM” and turns it into an -depth portrait of the inner stream-of-conscious thoughts of a woman who sits in the chair by the window each day wearing only heels 👠 waiting for the man she is the mistress of, musing about their relationship and how she ended up here. Beautifully written, poetic prose, catching but a moment in Time. Very evocative and complex, though not in a traditional format.

The Long Legged Girl has a similar inner thought format rather than a traditional story format. A jealous wife, a college professor, his young blonde protege. The wife’s frustrations spilling out. The thoughts cascading through her mind. Or is it all just in her head?

The Sign of the Beast is a story about childhood, infatuation, religion, obsession, bullying, mental difficulties, and outsider status. It is once again narrated through the eyes of one character - a student in Sunday school who is fascinated by his teacher -or is she flirting?

The Experimental Subject is almost weird and offbeat, touching on subjects of sex, race, fetishisms, beasts, unattractiveness, naïveté, and using people. It’s a really odd story that will make the reader a little uncomfortable.

And that’s all before we get to the Lovecraftian world.