Joyce Carol Oates~"Black Dahlia & White Rose"~Stories

 

 

                                                                 SUMMARY :

A wildly inventive new collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates that charts the surprising ways in which the world we think we know can unexpectedly reveal its darker contours
The New York Times has hailed Joyce Carol Oates as "a dangerous writer in the best sense of the word, one who takes risks almost obsessively with energy and relish." Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of eleven previously uncollected stories, showcases the keen rewards of Oates's relentless brio and invention. In one beautifully honed story after another, Oates explores the menace that lurks at the edges of and intrudes upon even the seemingly safest of lives—and maps with rare emotional acuity the transformational cost of such intrusions.
Unafraid to venture into no-man's-lands both real and surreal, Oates takes readers deep into dangerous territory, from maximum-security prison—vividly delineating the heartbreaking and unexpected atmosphere of such an institution—to the inner landscapes of two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles: Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia, victim of a long-unsolved and particularly brutal murder, and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroe. Whether exploring the psychological compulsion of the wife of a well-to-do businessman who is ravished by, and elopes with, a lover who is not what he seems or the uneasily duplicitous relationships between young women and their parents, Black Dahlia & White Rose explores the compelling intertwining of dread and desire, the psychic pull and trauma of domestic life, and resonates at every turn with Oates's mordant humor and her trenchant observation.


PARTICULARS OF THE BOOK :

Published by:  Harper Collins Publishers
Pages:  274
Genre:  Fiction/Short Stories
Find Out More:  http://harpercollins.com/JOYCECAROLOATES
Purchase from:  Amazon


A SMALL BIO. OF MS OATES :

 

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Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Book Award, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the National Humanities Medal, our government's highest civilian honor for the arts.  She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers "We Were the Mulvaneys," "Blonde," which was nominated for the National Book Award, and The New York Times best seller "The Falls," which won the 2005 Prix Femina.

 

She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.  In 2003 she received the Commonwealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.  She is the 2010 recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award.

 

Joyce Carol Oates lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

 

* Side note:  She is The Bookish Dame's favorite author.

 

 

 

A Video on how Ms Oates Develops Characters:

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BOOKISH DAME'S REVIEW :

 

There is nothing to do but give abundant praise of anything Ms Oates considers sharing with us in writing.  "Black Dahlia & White Rose" is no exception to her extraordinary gifts.  This is a volume of her grotesque, in keeping with some of her horroresque stories that she occasionally likes to write.  I'm a fan.  I fall at her knees and read voraciously everything that comes from her mind and "pen."

This is a book of stories for those who enjoy the wit and twist of mind of Joyce Carol Oates.

 

I loved her black humor and her distorted report of mad-ness in these stories.  They make you shiver at the perversion of some human-beings and the sadness and loneliness of others.  There is a minute exploration of the minds of characters that references the darkest psyches of us all.  She tends to cull out and undress the hidden in people.

 

One wonders where she draws all her information!  These stories are consummate Oates, but they are new in that they explore contemporary issues and the modern mind-set.

 

I loved the collection, and I know fans of hers will, too.  So will those who don't know her, yet.  How I envy those who are just on the cusp of discovering her.  This will be a great introduction to her macabre and grotesque set in the ordinary of every day happenings.  You must get a copy this year!!

 

5+ stars of excellence                        Deborah/TheBookishDame

 



 

 

 

 



"The Taker" by Alma Katsu ~ Irresistible!

Alma Katsu's "The Taker," #1 in her Taker Trilogy, is a thoroughly irresistible book.  It takes you by surprise when you think you know it all and have read it all.  It captures your imagination when you think you know what's coming on the next page, and it turns your mind around when you think you've figured it all out in the end!  This is a novel that has everything and more than you could expect from a gothic.  You haven't experienced everything from New England's dark past...Maine and Boston still hold mysteries that are incomprehensible.  You may want to pick up "The Taker" before you read Ms Katsu's newest book in her series, "The Reckoning!"

Summary :

True love can last an eternity . . . but immortality comes at a price. . . .

On the midnight shift at a hospital in rural Maine, Dr. Luke Findley is expecting another quiet evening of frostbite and the occasional domestic dispute. But the minute Lanore McIlvrae—Lanny—walks into his ER, she changes his life forever. A mysterious woman with a past and plenty of dark secrets, Lanny is unlike anyone Luke has ever met. He is inexplicably drawn to her . . . despite the fact that she is a murder suspect with a police escort. And as she begins to tell her story, a story of enduring love and consummate betrayal that transcends time and mortality, Luke finds himself utterly captivated.

Her impassioned account begins at the turn of the nineteenth century in the same small town of St. Andrew, Maine, back when it was a Puritan settlement. Consumed as a child by her love for the son of the town’s founder, Lanny will do anything to be with him forever. But the price she pays is steep—an immortal bond that chains her to a terrible fate for all eternity. And now, two centuries later, the key to her healing and her salvation lies with Dr. Luke Findley.

Part historical novel, part supernatural page-turner, The Taker is an unforgettable tale about the power of unrequited love not only to elevate and sustain, but also to blind and ultimately destroy, and how each of us is responsible for finding our own path to redemption.

Particulars of the Book :
Publisher:  Gallery Books/Simon and Schuster
Pages:  436  (Original hardback edition)
Genre:  Paranormal Fantasy/Historical Fiction/Gothic Novel
Author:  Alma Katsu Website:  http://almakatsu.com
Purchase the book here:  Barnes and Noble

About Alma Katsu :

Alma Katsu lives outside of Washington, DC with her husband, musician Bruce Katsu. Her debut, The Taker, a Gothic novel of suspense, has been compared to the early work of Anne Rice and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. The novel was named a Top Ten Debut Novel of 2011 by the American Library Association and has developed an international following. The Reckoning, the second book in the trilogy, was published in June 2012. The Taker Trilogy is published by Gallery Books/Simon and Schuster.
Ms. Katsu is a graduate of the Master's writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor's degree from Brandeis University, where she studied with John Irving. She also attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers.
Prior to publication of her first novel, Ms. Katsu had a long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several US agencies.


The Dame's Review :

Not since Anne Rice have I read such an original book combining the paranormal and the gothic.  This is a New England horror novel with such a lush and gorgeous bent that it was difficult to tear myself away from it.  Alma Katsu makes it nearly impossible for me to have the courage to review her work.  I think she will be one of those authors we rush to read every time a new book  hits the stands.  Her intelligence bleeds through her every chapter, and the suspense builds as she lays out a story that plays like a movie such as "The Crucible" or "The Scarlet Letter."  This is a book that's laid layer upon layer. You can't help falling in love with her characters.  Simply a spell-binding book.

"The Taker" sat in my "to-be-read" pile for a long time.  The cover didn't excite me and I wasn't drawn to it until my daughter called and told me I just had to read it.  I pulled it out with some reluctance because it wasn't top on my list this week.  Once I began to read, I was mesmerized.  As I've said at the beginning of this post, it was thoroughly unexpected from the beginning.

The love story that anchors the book is so deep and real it will rake your heart with empathetic pain and reminescence of your first and true love.  There is such a depth of feeling Alma Katsu can convey that it's sterling. It rings throughout her book.  Scenes of violence are subtle; capped by the lushness of mystery and beauty but still shuttering to read.  I think this is the sort of genius that the early Anne Rice books showed. 

Her character, Lanore, is naturally brimming with darkness and multi-layers of personality.  She's complex which makes the story so enticing.  Lanore, a form of the french "le noire" or black; i.e., darkness...is a girl/woman who is both innocent and rich in dark hearted desires and plottings.  She's ever the wonderful protagonist because her underlying "evil" is so subtle!  Easy to adore, she's also a character with redeeming qualities that make her one you'll want to protect.

Ms Katsu is a born writer.  This book is no soft historical fiction or gothic paranormal.  This is way above your average book in this genre.  It's a work of art; the type of book that stands head and shoulders above the common one being written these days.

Highly recommended.  If it's in your TBR stack pull it out immediately!  If you haven't already bought it, run to your nearest shop or go online.  This is one you can't miss this year.  And, I'm not stopping here. I'm off to read and review "The Reckoning."

5 eternal stars

Deborah/TheBookishDame

"The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares" by Joyce Carol Oates~ Will Scare You!

Published by: Grove/Atlantic

Pages: 385

Genre: Fiction, Horror

Overview:

"The Corn Maiden" is the gut-wrenching story of Marissa, a beautiful and sweet, but somewhat slow, eleven-year-old girl with hair the color of corn silk. Her single mother comes home one night to find her missing and panics, frantically knocking on the doors of her neighbors. She finally calls the police, who want to know why she left her young daughter alone until 8:00 o’clock.Suspicion falls on a computer teacher at her school with no alibi for the time of the abduction. Obvious clues—perhaps too obvious—point directly to him. Unsuspected is Judah (born Judith), an older girl from the same school who has told two friends in her thrall of the Indian legend of the Corn Maiden, a girl sacrificed to ensure a good crop.The trusting Marissa happily went to a secluded basement with the older girls, pleased to be included, and is convinced that the world has ended and that they are the last survivors. Remaining an unaware hostage for days, she grows weaker on a sparse diet as Judah prepares her for sacrifice.The seemingly inevitable fate of Marissa becomes ever more terrifying as Judah relishes her power, leading to unbearable tension with a shocking conclusion.

Joyce Carol Oates

The Dame's Review:

Joyce Carol Oates hardly needs an introduction, so I've left that off in this review. It continues to amaze me that she is so prolific an author, so "current" and so singluar at the same time, while she is over 71 year old. Whether she's writing the somber story of her own widowhood, the story of a family in Niagra Falls during Love Canal days, or the story of a family torn apart by rape, Ms Oates is mesmerizing. She can also scare the life out of you! This collection of stories is well-named; they are your worst nightmares.

Classic Joyce Carol Oates

Just in time for Halloween, but even more so, "The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares" is a book you can keep for those weekends when you have friends up: great food is digesting, you're drinking a last crystal goblet of wine and you just want a bit of quiet entertainment...a sort of send-off to bed...a reading, a story to remember. This quiet weekend would best be spent in up-state NY, in the Catskills, possibly in a lodge you've all leased for the weekend. Nice...friends, the Fall, wine, an old lodge and Joyce Carol Oates. Run for your bed and pull the covers over your head!!

It's difficult to imagine the psychological stealth and horror that can come from the pen of a brainy artist such as Ms Oates; but, then again, that's the joy of reading her work. She has that bent toward the gothic and the gruesome as shown in her former work pictured below. She is gifted in this genre as well as her other areas of choice. Some of her best writing is culled from her short stories.

"The Corn Maiden," the title story of this collection is creepy. The girls perpetrating unspeakable rituals upon their "corn maiden" are creepy and vile. Jude, the primary perpetrator and leader of her little band of weirdos, is suburban-insane and twisted like few other early teens you'll ever meet. Besides all of this, and mingled with the strange ritualistic purpose for their kidnapping poor, defenseless Marissa of the corn-silk hair, are the frightening unknowns that Ms Oates serves up to us: how kids today live not knowing if they're going to survive tomorrow because of nuclear threats, not knowing if parents will be there for them, not knowing why they've been abandoned, not knowing if our food is safe, not knowing if their teacher is a molester, and so on. It's a story about the horrors our children face in their nightmares.
In the reading, you'll discover what else Marissa represents; that, too, is a horror, it's all disturbing. It's all good for us to think about.

Others of the stories also confront the nightmares of disassociation , displacement and dysfunction in families, coupled with the distortions of nature and mind. We know that often the scariest tales are the ones closest to being true or plausible. Not to mention that often those stories happen in the rural places close to home. Joyce Carol Oates was born and raised in Up-State NY...think of what Stephen King does for Maine, folks... And did you know that Timothy McVey grew up not far from where Ms Oates did?

Do you believe a cat can take the breath away; smother a baby? Just because a child imagines she experienced abuse, does that make it true? Is life stranger than fiction?

All I can tell you is that this book is not for the faint of heart. Joyce Carol Oates is a seriously great author no matter what she chooses to write. You can count on this being an extraordinarily good book of nightmarish tales on many levels. Just keep a lamp on...

5 moonstruck stars

Deborah/TheBookishDame

"Dead Bad Things" by Gary McMahon~Twilight Zonish Horror/Thriller!

Published by: Angry Robot/Osprey

Author's website:  http://www.garymcmahon.com/ 

Release Date Scheduled:  September 27, 2011
Purchase:  Amazon - $7.79 for Kindle

Synopsis :

Thomas Usher, a reluctant psychic, has gone off the radar in London, hiding from the fall-out of a previous case involving a missing young girl and several hanged strippers. Before long, and as if to confirm that he can never truly hide from the dead, Usher starts receiving messages - a clockwork voice on the phone, a Rwandan psychic who hears voices, hellish visions in a derelict riverside warehouse. Usher slowly realises that the answers to these riddles, and perhaps to the questions he has never dared ask about his personal history, will only be revealed if he returns home to Leeds...

Sarah Doherty is a police constable in Leeds. She and her partner - who is also her lover - are drawn into a nightmare when they find the mutilated body of a young boy. Is there some kind of serial killer operating on their patch, or do these grim discoveries point to something even worse - something from Sarah's own past, and involving her emotionally damaged family?

Trevor Dove is a disgraced showman, a flamboyant theatrical medium once exposed as a fraud by Thomas Usher. But the truth is, Dove did once possess a genuine ability to talk with the dead, and when he meets the Pilgrim - a shadowy figure from Thomas Usher's tragic past - he begins to rediscover his gift and unearth secrets that will place his very soul in peril. Driven by a thirst for revenge, he is fated to bring together Usher, Doherty and the Pilgrim in a confrontation that will undermine the fabric of reality.

The Dame Reviews:

Horror fans listen up!  This book is a smash hit.  I'm not ordinarily a reader of such books; and, actually I didn't know what I was getting into when I decided to read "Dead Bad Things."  However, this book captured me from the first page, and off I went on a thrilling ride of horror and suspense unlike any I'd been on for quite some time!  This book reminded me of early Stephen King and Dean Koontz so much that I found myself grinning at the oddest times with nostalgia.  It took me by surprise...difficult to do considering the amount of books I read!

Grim and gripping from the first moments we learn that a man is lamenting over the shallow grave of a tiny boy whom he's killed, and that he's receiving a baby girl from a darkly disguised "angel;" this book never stops driving us to its final conclusion.  Gary McMahon is a horror fiction writer best known in the UK where several of his books have been previously published.  I'm glad we finally are being acquainted with his books here.  I look forward to reading more.

I found McMahon's writing style captivating and descriptive to a point of sharpness.  He made even his supernatural characters believable and horrendous.  They were well imagined and fearful...not too "out of this world," but just to the edge of it and possible enough to be plausible.  This made the story scary and charged with suspense. 

Sarah was an undoubted favorite character for me.  I always love a feisty female who can beat the worst guy at his own game.  She is a fast thinking and tough reacting police detective who walks through her fears as valiantly as any superhero we can remember.  I'd go anywhere scary with Sarah in the lead!  I'd love to hear more of her in the future.

Thomas Usher, the dead-listening/seeing "angel-like" man, who plays a huge part in this novel, is mystery-clouded and we can enjoy uncovering who he actually is and why he's come into the arena of Sarah's life.  I especially loved reading about his search in the clairvoyant area.  So much fun!

Once we meet the dark angels and torturers, it's like reading the best and worst of horror stories.  Greatly interesting, enjoyable and something that makes you want to put your hands over your eyes at the same time.  As a reader of much softer literature, I was reading with "bug eyes," believe me!  This is an adult, sophisticated horror story!

I recommend this book to those who enjoy reading horror/suspense books.  It's not, after all, a Stephen King but it is a good book for a stormy night or two. 

I really enjoyed the book for a change in pace; after all, who hasn't seen a ghost or two--I have; haven't you?  

This one to keep an eye out for...
Second in a series about Thomas Usher.

4 stars

Deborah/TheBookishDame