Night, neon Tales of mystery and suspense

Abuse, madness, confinement, and flight are prominent themes in this strong collection of nine varied, dark, and disquieting stories from Oates (Night, Sleep, Death, the Stars). Masterly executed stream-of-consciousness prose bolsters unpredictable, haunting tales like the impressive "Detour," in which a woman's ill-chosen route home leads her to a nightmarish alternate reality. In the equally unusual "Miss Golden Dreams 1949," the narrator is an expensively priced cloned collector's piece from the 1940s. Other highlights include the ingeniously crafted "Curious," which details an infatuated novelist's attempt to improve a grocery store clerk's unhappy situation, and the tense yet delightfully comic "Intimacy," in which a pitiable university professor is confronted by an aggressively unhinged student, who's resentful of the criticism his teacher and classmates have bestowed on his ghastly, deliberately upsetting fiction. Not every selection may be top-notch, but the erudite, inventive Oates is always worth reading. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)

The latest collection from the indefatigable Oates reprints a recent novella along with eight shorter nightmares. Nightmares is an even more apt term than usual for these stories, whose meanings are developed not by well-made plots but through flashbacks, reflections, or complications of their powerful opening tableaux. "Night, Neon," the longest tale, supplements its presentation of a heroine who's just learned that she's pregnant with a systematic account of her relationships with abusive men that makes this news a decidedly mixed blessing. In "Curious," an unrepentantly intellectual novelist who's asked "Where do you get your ideas?" recounts his obsession with a supermarket checkout girl. "Miss Golden Dreams 1949" is spoken in the spectral voice of a Marilyn Monroe clone offered for sale. The relationship the heroine of "Wanting" strikes up with an artist reaches a dead end that reveals that "wanting has doomed her." "Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino Ca" provides a litany of more or less self-contradictory reasons why a member of the Manson family should be paroled on her 15th try. "Intimacy" shows a professor's relationship with a menacing student becoming increasingly fraught without becoming increasingly well specified. The title character of "The Flagellant" constantly punishes himself for an unspeakable crime for which he cannot express remorse to his jailers. The caretaker of an ailing mother spirals out of control in "Vaping: A User's Manual." And in "Detour," the story that seems to be the exception to the anti-plot rule, a woman forced to take a detour two miles from her home slips the traces of her humdrum life and sinks into a hallucinatory alternate reality that shakes her to the core before releasing her. A perfect recipe for nine sleepless nights. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.