Oates' stories, especially the title story, give me that delicious, frightened feeling while reading...the certain knowledge that this cannot be going any place I want to go...I want to stop reading but I can't stop reading.... Marvelous. ( )

I believe the marketing people for this book had entirely different definitions for the words "Mystery" and "Suspense" than I do. I found very little of either in any of these stories. The kindest thing I can say for these offerings is that the author took a different approach in her writing and produced some very good investigations into character study. The 2 stars I gave the book in no way reflects on the author's abilities...heaven forbid that I would dare to give literary advise to an author that has successfully produced over 60 plus books...it merely reflects how the the book as a whole appealed to me. If you are looking for mystery and suspense though you won't find much of it here. ( )

Everyone always says this, but it's true...this woman's output it just astonishing. And the places her imagination takes her....yikes! In this collection of short stories she gets inside the heads of some very scary people, and does brilliant things for the reader. She loves to take a concept that's almost a cliche...like the closeness of twins, for instance...and turn it inside out. I'm a bit surprised at her female characters...there aren't any particularly strong women here. In fact, most of the women are victims, either of men or of circumstances. Many of them are also somewhat ineffective mothers. Of course, there are no male heroes either...the strong men use that strength in abusive, destructive ways. Hard to say what compels the reader through these stories when there is nothing uplifting in any of them. Her genius with form is one aspect...she often seems to be experimenting with that, and usually it works fairly well. The first selection in this collection, "Hi! Howya Doin!", would be stream of consciousness, except that the narrator is omniscient, so whose consciousness would it be? In "Bad Habits", the narrator seems to be telling a first person tale in which 3 children face drastic changes in their lives when their father is taken away and implicated in horrible crimes. The children are referred to individually as "A", "T", and "D,", and collectively as "us". But it is never clear who is telling the story; is it one of those three, or yet another child who does not appear, but only relates what happens? "Valentine, July Heat Wave" owes a little something to Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", and really fails to shock as the ending is so predictable almost from the first page. The weakest story in the lot, I think, is the title selection. Oates does an incredible job of subtly raising the tension, making the reader feel the narrator's mounting fear, but the ending is a bit of an anti-climax. I haven't read much of Oates' work, and I'm not a big fan of horror, but I left this one with a great deal of admiration for her talent and skill, even when I might not love the result. ( )

Que de délices frissonnants se trouvent dans cette collection! Oates a un talent de conteuse incroyable : des mots simples, des phrases qui coulent, un texte en apparence anodin, mais qui accroche, qui engouffre et qui ne libère plus le lecteur jusqu'à la fin. Ses romans sont excellents mais ses nouvelles sont extraordinaires : toutes différentes les unes des autres, elles s'imprègnent néanmoins dans la peau, s'insinuent dans le cerveau et hantent l'esprit. Un moment absolument exquis! ( )

This is only the second Oates I’ve read, the first being the more-or-less conventional We Were the Mulvaneys that did not prepare me in any way for this collection of short stories, which are billed “mystery and suspense”. The suspense I get; I’m not so sure about mystery. All of the stories have an element of the criminal or the macabre.

I found “Suicide Watch” to be the most memorable: told from the point of view of a businessman who has been called to visit his son in prison(?)/ psychiatric hospital(?) The businessman’s grandson & the child’s mother are missing, and the son isn’t talking. When he does open up to his father, he tells a chilling tale of mailing the boy’s body to his father – and then proclaims it all a test to see if his father would believe such a thing of him.
I’m checking my mail every day for parcels.

Read this if: you like short stories that can make your spine tingle; or you’re a Joyce Carol Oates fan. 3 stars ( )