Review by Booklist Review
As the distressed narrator in the title story in Oates' latest set of unnerving tales notes, the chilling word dismember sounds like remember, which she is loath to do. Growing up on an impoverished farm, Jill had secretly succumbed to the edgy allure of a stepcousin with a sky-blue Chevy who tried to involve her in his macabre crimes. A similarly tenuous family bond, along with the prevalence of guns and alcohol, violently escalates the rivalry between two young sisters in Heartbreak. Oates' modus operandi is to overwhelm the already fragile psyches of imperiled girls and women by intensifying their perception of malevolence in their surroundings. Such as when a struggling university student becomes dangerously obsessed with the unsolved case of another female student found naked and dead in a rooftop water tank, and, in Great Blue Heron, when a new widow's grief and rage turn her fascination with the predatory bird into a fever dream of metamorphosis and revenge. Oates' superbly creepy collection concludes with a surprise: a deliciously lacerating and nightmarish parody of airline safety instructions.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Greater variety-along the lines of Oates's outstanding 2016 collection, The Doll-Master-would have enhanced these seven well-crafted stories of menace, madness, and murder. The first four each feature a psychologically vulnerable female protagonist, whose obsession will land her in life-threatening jeopardy, starting with Jill, the title tale's awkward young narrator, who lets the thrill of Elvis-slick looks and a sky-blue Chevy blind her to a distant relative's menace. The atmosphere becomes downright miasmic by the fourth tale, "The Drowned Girl," in which the narrator, a university transfer student, becomes fixated on student Miri Krim's demise in a rooftop water tank months earlier. In the final trio, Oates shuffles the deck plotwise but maintains the creepiness quotient. In "The Situations," a father flings the three newborn kittens his children want to keep off a bridge; in "Welcome to Friendly Skies!," a plane's passengers appear to be winging to something more sinister than an anticipated polar bird-watching expedition. All in all, dis turb ing. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In her latest short story collection, Oates (A Book of American Martyrs; Jack of Spades) uses her characters' thoughts to explore the frightening undercurrents of chaos and misogynistic violence that lie beneath the normal world. The women in these stories try to fight back or escape but are treated violently, their needs ignored, dismissed. Each story begins as a crime that quickly crosses into the territory of horror and madness. This is certainly the case in "The Crawl Space" (winner of the 2016 Bram Stoker Award). Brianna feels compelled repeatedly to revisit the house she shared with her abusive husband. What force draws her? Why are the current owners so eager for her to see the cramped dark crawl space in the basement? In "The Drowned Girl," narrator Alida investigates the murder of a student found drowned in a water tank. But, she says, the worst thing is not the murder/rape but that "no one will ever be arrested.. Nothing will ever be resolved...." Most important, Alida knows something terrible will happen again. And again and again, as these dark stories reveal. Verdict Short story collections can be a hard sell, but readers who like the dark psychology of Patricia Highsmith or Hilary Mantel will find these tales compelling.-Susanne Lohkamp, Multnomah Cty. Lib., Portland, OR © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The indefatigable Oates (A Book of American Martyrs, 2017, etc.) offers up seven gothic tales that plumb the depths of women who, whatever their age, always seem to stand on the threshold of the heartbreaking tides of adolescence.Of the four longest, and most successful, of these stories, the most straightforward, "Heartbreak," which shows the ways an attractive stepcousin new to the family heightens the rivalry between two sisters, is a textbook demonstration of Chekhov's dictum about what has to happen after you show a gun hanging on the wall in Act 1. "The Drowned Girl" traces a troubled college student's descent into madness as she identifies ever more closely with another student whom she'd never known before her corpse was fished out of the water tank of a rooming house. "Great Blue Heron" plots a similar trajectory in showing a new widow's rejection of her importunate brother-in-law as she forges an even more uncanny identification with a bird of prey. And the title story filters a series of thrill killings of children through the mind of a sensitive, tormented preteen whose normal, age-appropriate fears and uncertainties gradually turn monstrous. In the shorter tales, another widow makes an ill-advised return to the house she vacated seven years earlier in "The Crawl Space"; an authoritarian father shows his children who's boss in "The Situations"; and "Welcome to Friendly Skies!," whose broadly satirical burlesque makes it the outlier here, unmasks the balefully amusing subtexts of all those safety announcements aboard passenger flights. 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
