September 2, 2024
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.