Flint Kill Creek Stories of mystery and suspense

Average people face the macabre in this grimly satisfying collection of 12 stories from Oates (Butcher). The proximity of love and hate--or at least attraction and violence--animate most of the tales, each a compact gem of unease. In "Weekday," a frantic mother worries that her forgetful, easily distracted husband has lost their infant daughter. In "The Phlebotomist," a benign tale of parking lot seduction quickly careens into noir territory. "Bone Marrow Donor" continues the medical fascinations of Oates's latest novel, packing the nerve-shredding tension of a top-shelf medical thriller into five pages. Other stories draw chills by spinning mundane concerns into houses of horror: "Happy Christmas" follows a young woman who heads home to spend the holidays with her mother and new stepfather, only to discover darkness beneath the pair's domestic bliss; "Friend of My Heart" is a delicious, near-operatic portrait of professional jealousy that focuses on a rumpled adjunct professor growing mad with envy over a colleague's success. In each case, Oates's prose is surgically precise, and her appetite for the grotesque falls on the right side of lurid. This will thrill the author's fans. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (Nov.)

Thirteen stories--12 previously published in magazines--from the reigning monarch of neo-gothic creepy-crawlies. Despite the collection's subtitle and its publication by the Mysterious Press, none of these tales is a traditional mystery, and most are suspenseful only in the broad sense that all effective fiction is. The common thread is dysfunctional couples. The new lovers in the title story--which opens the book--embark on a hike that's bound to end badly. The patient in "The Phlebotomist" is pressed ever more disturbingly by the man who takes her blood. The widow in "The Heiress. The Hireling" dreams of a man coming for her. The husband in "Weekday" is so self-absorbed that he treats everything his wife says as a personal intrusion. The wife in "Bone Marrow Donor" resolves to go through a painful procedure to benefit her husband. The together-forever couple in "Mick & Minn" turn out to be less than ideal foster parents. The new wife in "Late Love" is troubled by the bad dreams of her husband, who insists he's not having any. And the final story, "The Siren: 1999," circles back to Flint Kill Creek for a chilling coda. Other couples are less obvious: the narrator and the mother he visits in "***" in a desperate attempt to find out why his calendar has marked June 11 as so important; the discarded and vengeful friend who stalks her more successful ex-buddy in "Friend of My Heart"; the woman whose holiday visit to her mother in "Happy Christmas" is curdled by mom's new boyfriend; the heroine of "The Nice Girl" who's hopelessly in thrall to the needs of her bipolar older sister. They're all a mess in this anthology of folies à deux. Fever dreams for readers with a taste for freak shows that just might be about them. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.