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Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense
Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense
Audiobook9 hours

Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

Written by Joyce Carol Oates

Narrated by Xe Sands and Tim Campbell

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

The book opens with a woman, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, seated in front of the window in an apartment she cannot, on her own, afford. In this exquisitely tense narrative reimagining of Edward Hopper's Eleven A.M., 1926, the reader enters the minds of both the woman and her married lover, each consumed by alternating thoughts of disgust and arousal, as he rushes, amorously, murderously, to her door. In "The Long-Legged Girl," an aging, jealous wife crafts an unusual game of Russian roulette involving a pair of Wedgewood teacups, a strong Bengal brew, and a lethal concoction of medicine. Who will drink from the wrong cup, the wife or the dance student she believes to be her husband's latest conquest? In "The Sign of the Beast," when a former Sunday school teacher's corpse turns up, the blighted adolescent she had by turns petted and ridiculed confesses to her murder-but is he really responsible? Another young outsider, Horace Phineas Love, Jr., is haunted by apparitions at the very edge of the spectrum of visibility after the death of his tortured father in "Night-Gaunts," a fantastic ode to H.P. Lovecraft.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 5, 2018
ISBN9781684413478
Author

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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Reviews for Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

Rating: 4.0588235294117645 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    These weren't the greatest of Oates' short stories but they were good. The Long-Legged Girl, I just know must be inspired by the relationship of Shirley Jackson and her husband Stanley. The Experiment Subject was one of the most disturbing stories I think I've ever read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The first story, “The Woman in the Window”, opens with a naked woman sitting in a window waiting for her married lover. Is there still love in her heart for this man or has it turned to hatred? Have her feelings for her remained the same?In “The Long-Legged Girl”, a woman has decided to play Russian roulette with poisoned tea with her husband’s beautiful dance student.“Sign of the Beast” is a disturbing tale of a young boy who Sunday School teacher shows him unwanted attention.In “Walking Wounded”, a man working on a well-known author’s posthumous work keeps finding erotic references that seem to reflect what’s happening in his own life.The title story, “Night-Gaunts”, explores the damnation of heredity is such a frightening way.If I had to pick a favorite out of all of these unique stories, it would be “The Experimental Subject”. This is a nightmarish story about a lab technician who lures a naïve, unattractive young woman to be the unknowing recipient of a chimpanzee’s sperm in the hopes that she will give birth to the first “Humanzee”. I have never been disappointed by the work of Joyce Carol Oates and she certainly doesn’t let her readers down with this selection of short stories. They are some of the most unusual, creative, horrific stories I’ve ever read. If you like your stories all neatly tied up at the end, these won’t be your cup of tea. Most of the stories leave the reader hanging but I actually enjoy wondering what happened and letting my imagination fill in the blanks. This is an excellent selection of horror tales from an author who just keeps improving.Most highly recommended.This book was given to me by the publisher in return for an honest review.