Joyce Carol Oates, Our Most Surprising Horror Novelist
She was taking horror seriously before it was cool to do so.
MY RELATIONSHIP WITH THE FICTION of Joyce Carol Oates has been long, sporadic, and alternately rewarding and frustrating.1 Those who’ve read more of her work over the course of her long and breathtakingly prolific career than I have might question some of the choices I’ve made when reading her. For example, I’ve never read Them or Blonde (which Oates herself has said probably have the best chance of standing the test of time). But I have read The Triumph of the Spider Monkey, an early novel with a fractured structure that helps illustrate the mind of its psychopathic narrator; her semi-recent thriller Jack of Spades; and Hazards of Time Travel, one of her few forays into science fiction. And I didn’t like any of those.
On the other hand, I’ve had mostly positive experiences with the short fiction I’ve read from Oates: The Pulitzer-finalist What I Lived For is quite good, and two shorter novels—Black Water, her fictionalized version of Chappaquiddick, and Zombie, her fictionalized take on Jeffrey Dahmer—are particularly brilliant. Zombie is a grimy, deeply uncomfortable chronicle of sheer black-hearted depravity, and in Black Water, the terror and sense of maddening injustice experienced during the final moments in the life of Kelly Kelleher, Oates’s version of Mary Jo Kopechne, have stayed with me for years. (I’m also fond of Expensive People and Beasts. A strange and random assortment, I’m sure Oates devotees would agree.)
Zombie’s horror bona fides should be obvious. But Beasts—in its story of awful psychological torture and manipulation, one that ends with an act of shocking vengeance—fits in there as well, as does much of Oates’s fiction. Oates is unusual among capital-L Literary writers of her age in that she’s never tried to mask her interest in mystery, suspense, and horror fiction, nor has she ever claimed to be more high-minded about it than the genre writers she admires. There’s nothing about her writing that suggests she believes she’s “transcending” genre (a pernicious type of snobbery that I have, if possible, less than no time for). She vocally supported Stephen King at a time when other writers of her stature would only sneer at him. An anthology she edited called American Gothic Fiction contains stories by everyone from Herman Melville and Paul Bowles to Harlan Ellison, King, and Thomas Ligotti.
It’s in her short fiction that Oates really lets this side of her talents fly, and there is a lot of that. The number of original story collections she’s written far exceeds the entire bibliographies of most writers. Many of these collections are devoted to, or contain examples of, a wide variety of horror fiction. And despite how dark Oates can get, no matter what she’s writing, she’s not always overly solemn about it. She can be playful. Take “Mystery, Inc.,” from her collection The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror. In it, an independent owner of a number of bookstores that specialize in mystery and suspense fiction travels to a small town in New England, where a legendary store of the same type that the narrator owns can be found. It soon becomes clear that his plan is to meet the owner, the similarly legendary, and beloved, Aaron Neuhaus, make himself interesting enough to be invited to speak with Neuhaus after hours, poison him with a chocolate truffle, and ultimately, in the not-too-distant future, buy the store from Neuhaus’s sure-to-be-overwhelmed widow, as well as the store’s remarkable stock of antiques and rarities.
As the two men cheerfully discuss their shared interests over coffee in Neuhaus’s office, hints emerge that the narrator’s murderous plans are beginning to go sideways, in ways it would be easy for the reader to guess at. But what tips “Mystery, Inc.” from suspense into horror is the history of the store as related by Neuhaus, which is a sinister one full of violence and despair, certain odd shifts in the owner’s behavior, and suggestions that the place might be haunted. The story is playful in that Mystery, Inc., the store, is clearly inspired by the Mysterious Bookshop, the famous NYC book store owned by editor and publisher Otto Penzler, with whom Oates has had a long professional relationship (The Doll-Master was published, as were many other Oates books, by Penzler’s Mysterious Press).
That collection’s title story is more filled with dread. In it, a boy named Robbie reacts badly to the death of his young cousin, Amy. Robbie is the narrator, and as the story goes along, he speaks in a way that suggests he doesn’t understand death for what it is, thinking of it instead as “gone away” (Oates’s italics). To ease his sorrow, he adopts Amy’s favorite doll as his own, and along the way he describes his mission to collect other dolls, which he calls “found dolls.” When you match this with the story that plays out mostly in the background about local girls going missing, it’s not too hard to connect the dots. Upon Robbie finding a “doll” he calls Bride Barbie, Oates writes:
Barbie had given me the most difficulty, in fact. You would not think that a doll so small and weighing so little could scream so loud and that her fingernails, shaped and polished and very sharp, could inflict such damage on my bare forearms.
But unpredictability isn’t everything. Robbie writes often of “My Friend,” who speaks to him, and urges him in his collecting, in ways as sinister as you can imagine. And later in life, as an adult, Robbie starts a website featuring obscure, hard-to-identify photos of his “dolls”:
My website visitors have become faithful correspondents . . . it is thrilling for me, as I believe it has to be for them, and some of these females . . . that we skirt the edges of our essential subject, and seek metaphors and poetic turns of speech to express our (forbidden) desires. For it has been revealed to me as a fact, that where the dull-essential nature of our lives is eliminated, such as age, identity, education, employment, place of residence, family ties, daily routine, etc., the thrilling-essential is revealed.
ONE OF OATES’S MORE SKIN-CRAWLING STORIES is “Family,” collected in Heat and Other Stories (1991). It is set in a post-apocalyptic world, the remaining inhabitants of which have long ago tried to rebuild society. Says the narrator: “For as Father said, ‘Is there a new world struggling to be born—or only struggle?’” Early on, the family at the center breaks up: The father leaves, and the mother introduces a man the narrator dubs New Father (a curiously sinister phrase). In addition to him there are his children, so the family hasn’t diminished but expanded. But these new children come from a better, or anyway easier, part of the country, sneering at the dirty water their new family has become used to drinking.
Tensions and hardships mount, family members die of malnourishment or shotgun wounds. One daughter, Cory, has a baby, from a father she refuses to name, a baby that horrifies Mother, and who can’t bring herself to refer to it, with “its mere holes for nostrils, its small pursed mouth set like a manta ray’s in its shallow face,” as “baby, or infant, nor even the cruel Cory’s bastard.” Mother shrinks to under five feet. Cory dies, found in bed, soaked in blood, gotten to by rats. This leaves her baby to be dealt with. It’s a hideous story, really, its air of grotesque nightmare filtered through the language of an innocent girl who knows nothing else, nothing better.
MY FAVORITE STORY BY OATES, horror or otherwise, is probably her most famous. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” from her 1970 collection The Wheel of Love and Other Stories would probably not be considered a horror story by most, but I believe it qualifies for a variety of reasons, not least being Oates’s obvious interest, and deep reading, in the genre. In the story, a pretty 15-year-old girl named Connie has a strained relationship with her parents and sister. She has friends, and goes out with them, shopping together, and other normal things like this. On one of these outings, a man named Arnold Friend approaches her. He flirts confidently with her, though Connie is more reticent. He pressures her, not too aggressively, to take a ride with him. Before she’s properly introduced herself, but after telling him she’s too busy to go out with him, he says, “Connie, you ain’t telling the truth. This is your day set aside for a ride with me and you know it.” She takes note that she hadn’t yet told him her name, but is somewhat hypnotized by him anyway:
He took off the sunglasses and she saw how pale the skin around his eyes was, like holes that were not in shadow but instead in light. His eyes were like chips of broken glass that catch the light in an amiable way.
One day, sometime later, Connie’s family goes out, leaving her behind. Arnold Friend shows up at her house. Claiming he’s 18, Connie thinks he might be as old as 30, and her earlier enchantment with him begins to wane, and she turns suspicious. He becomes threatening, insisting that he’s already her lover. She says he’s crazy, and he says “Yes, I’m your lover. You don’t know what that is but you will.” Their conversation proceeds, with Arnold’s words becoming stranger and stranger, telling her that her dad’s not coming back when she insists he is. Connie speaks to him through the front screen door, Arnold by his car outside. He says he won’t come in if she comes out. Connie begins to, not so much consent, as bend to his will, even as he becomes more terrifying:
Arnold Friend said, in a gentle loud voice that was like a stage voice, “The place where you came from ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now—inside your daddy’s house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?”
Though seemingly straightforward as a story about a horrible man destroying an innocent girl, there is an ambiguity to what happens after, and the nature of Arnold Friend. That doesn’t change his evil, or her innocence, but who is he? His behavior is of a malevolence far stranger than the fraudulent entitlement of an everyday predator. This open mystery, this subtle alienness, suggests another old horror idea, that of the mysterious stranger, such as Shirley Jackson’s Daemon Lover. Or, more to the point, Mark Twain’s “The Mysterious Stranger,” in which the title character was Satan himself. We’ll never know. Tragically, however, Connie will.
This isn’t what led Oates to block me on Twitter. I honestly don’t remember what happened there, but I will confess that there’s at least a decent chance that I had it coming. She’s very outspoken on Twitter and I’m easily annoyed. Sue me.
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