Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense

By: Joyce Carol Oates

Narrated by: Tim Campbell, Xe Sands

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 Wedgwood 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.

©2018 The Ontario Review, Inc. (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Again...excellent stories!

I have read almost everything that Joyce Carol Oates has written. She is an American literary master and does not disappoint...I only ask that characters are no longer called by their initials...it's annoying and disrupts the flow of the stories.

The writing was good, the stories were not.

The writing and character development were good, but the stories were mostly boring and unsettling.

What??????

I though this was very strange. Listened for hours, waiting for a redemptive value, but no. Narrators good, no so much for the book.