Dis Mem Ber

April 17, 2017
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.

May 1, 2017
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)