Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque [Mass Market Paperback]

The stories seem to become increasingly horrific as they go from the first to the last in the collection. It's as if Oates felt obliged to keep raising the stakes; as our sensibilities absorbed the shock of one story, she took us to a new level of terror with the next.

Ms. Oates raises the horror quotient by making her villains people or places we thought we knew. The first story in the collection, "Haunted", centers around the friendship of two twelve-year old girls who live in the country and share a fondness for exploring abandoned places. Ms. Oates captures the feelings of preadolescent angst and hands them back to us effortlessly. Just when we relax and think this is just a coming of age story with an edge, Ms. Oates twists it into a real life horror story with sexual abuse and murder. In "The Doll," a woman's memories of the dollhouse that occupied many hours of her childhood, begin to haunt her when she stumbles on what she believes to be its real-life replica. In "The White Cat", an adoring husband blames the distance growing between he and his young and beautiful wife on her white Persian cat. The cat in this story proves true the adage that cat's have nine lives. Too late, the husband learns he's only got one. We are instantly suspicious of Mr. Starr, the older gentlemen who befriends the young woman in "The Model", in spite of his many acts of kindness. We watch with horror as the young woman, against her better instincts, is drawn into his web. In "Extenuating Circumstances" and "The Guilty Party", Ms. Oates shows us how anger towards the men that abandoned them can turn mothers into monsters. "The Premonition" is aptly named since the horror in that tale is suggested rather than told, felt rather than realized. We watch as a lovely woman and her cheerful daughters, pretend that all is well, while offering shabby excuses regarding the notable absence of the man of the house (who no one - not even the brother who dropped in for a visit - will miss), all the while washing up large pans and knives and tying off large garbage bags. The collection culminates with "Martyrdom", a story so grotesque I truly wish I'd never read it.

Reading "Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque" is an exhausting experience. Ms. Oates gives us, quite adeptly, narratives with themes of betrayal, rape, child abuse and murder. Such themes become tiresome as we come to the end of the collection. But like the onlooker who drives slowly by a grisly accident scene, to catch a glimpse of something he knows he'd rather not see, Ms. Oates writing compels us to keep reading. I couldn't help thinking that like a gansta-rap CD that conveys its message in language some sensibilities can't handle, the book should bear a warning sticker stating "READER BEWARE: NOT FOR THE FAINTHEARTED."

And while these questions do much to spook us and the consistent tilt of reality indeed make us shiver, most of these stories stop short of real tension since the more you read them, the more you can see the ending a mile away. The formula is simple: Here's an ordinary person. Here's an ordinary person with ordinary flaws in an extraordinary situation. The ordinary person is driven to insanity. Any questions? In "The Premonition," Ellen Paxton undergoes this shift from sanity to insanity and enlists her children's help in killing her abusive husband. In the very next story, Julia Matterling of "Phase Change," emerges as a completely different, psychologically off-base woman after enduring her own onslaught of imagined abuse. Similarly, Sybil Blake takes revenge on her estranged father in "The Model." And, the mother in "The Guilty Party" comes to the point where she is ready to murder the man who abandoned her and her baby, Jocko. June Cleaver goes postal. Donna Reed goes on a rampage. There seems to be a desperate stretch for the gruesome-if it's horrible enough, it will be exciting, right? But, in the end, the boringness of repetition wins out over the shock appeal.

Furthermore, many of these stories are biased and hatred-filled in the most overly abused way. In every story (except "The White Cat" which could truly be argued either way), the man is the real villain, with our sympathies directed around the murdering heroine. We're led to believe that murder is the inevitable result of abuse and that abuse is almost always the result of simply being with a man, be it your husband or your estranged lover or the sleazy abortionist or even the demon-possessed two-year-old son. In "Extenuating Circumstances," the very title suggests that the narrator, who has killed her own child, is somehow excused because of the child's father's slighting her: "Because there was shame in it. Loving you knowing you would not love me enough," (148). Perhaps the most objectionable use of this gender-based hatred is seen in the last story, "Martyrdom" in which the husband cruelly sexually abuses his wife. (And may I add that this story seeks to be disgusting just for the point of being disgusting. It's absolutely vile.) It's hard to tell if Oates is genuinely concerned with the position of women in society or if she is simply looking to excuse every criminal act completed by a woman, past, present, or future.

While these stories are well crafted in some respects, bringing the reader to icy depths of character psychoanalysis, they lack in any real variety of plot or situation. While the reader may find them vaguely satisfying on one level, it is not a level most of us want to operate continually, especially for the duration of three hundred and some pages. Their persistent caricature of the abusive man and the revengeful woman is trying, boring, and irritating. In short, I think there's so much better out there to read-why waste your time?