Dis Mem Ber: And Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

In the seven feverishly unsettling works that compose DIS MEM BER and Other Stories of Mystery and Suspense, exquisite prose stylist Joyce Carol Oates focuses on the inner lives of vulnerable girls and women—some victimized, others provoked by deep emotional unrest—to commit violence against others. This is an arresting fiction collection from “one of the great writers of our time” (John Gardner).

In the title story, a precocious eleven-year-old is in thrall to an older male relative—the mysterious, attractive black sheep of the family—and climbs into his sky-blue Chevy to be driven to an uncertain, and unforgettable, fate. In the Bram Stoker Award-winning short story, “The Crawl Space,” a widow obsessively returns to the house she once shared with her husband, until an invitation from the new owners to come inside takes a turn for the menacing. In “The Drowned Girl,” a university transfer student becomes increasingly obsessed with the drowning/murder of another female student as her own sense of self begins to deteriorate. And in the final story, “Welcome to Friendly Skies,” a trusting group of bird-watchers is borne to a remote part of the globe—and to a harrowing fate.

At the heart of this meticulously crafted, deeply disquieting collection are girls and women confronting the danger around them, and the danger hidden inside their turbulent selves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802128119
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	06/19/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

JOYCE CAROL OATES is the author of such national bestsellers as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys. Her other titles for The Mysterious Press include Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense, which features “The Woman in the Window,” selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2017; The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, which won the 2016 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection; The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares, which won the 2011 Bram Stoker Award for Short Horror Fiction; and Jack of Spades. She is the recipient of the National Book Award for them and the 2010 President’s National Humanities Medal.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Read an Excerpt

From “Dis mem ber”

At the bridge Rowan Billiet takes hold of my wrist to lead me down the steep path to the creek. His forefinger and thumb gripping my wrist hard enough to leave a red mark.

It is just a playful gesture, I am thinking. The way my grandfather runs his callused fingers through my hair and I am not supposed to flinch or whimper or cry for that will hurt Grandpa’s feelings.

Beneath the bridge there is a large dark rectangular shadow in the water that is the shadow of the bridge rippling like something alive and breathing. The shallow water near shore is heaped with rocks but also concrete rubble and rusted iron rods and it is here that Rowan pulls me toward to see something that looks at first like slow-bobbing clothes or rags or something woolly. Unless I shut my eyes (as Rowan would not allow me to do) there is nowhere else to look.

See? That’s something ain’t it, lookit the size of that.

Rowan makes a thin whistling sound. I don’t understand what I am seeing. My eyes blink and swell with moisture. And the strong smell of it, that comes up in hot wafts like heat from a vent in the floor, that makes me feel faint.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for DIS MEM BER:

“Seven gothic tales that plumb the depths of women who, whatever their age, always seem to stand on the threshold of the heartbreaking tides of adolescence . . . Oates creates worlds and minds as overwrought and paranoid as anything a female Poe could imagine, then sprinkles her trademark exclamation points licentiously through the interior monologues to heighten the intimacy between ecstasy and madness.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Unnerving . . . Oates’ superbly creepy collection concludes with a surprise: a deliciously lacerating and nightmarish parody of airline safety instructions.” —Booklist

“Oates, undeniably a master of the macabre, gets deep inside your soul and plants seeds of misery. This collection of stories could leave you afraid to be a child and terrified to grow up . . . Brilliantly crafted. Oates doesn’t have one flabby sentence, not one superfluous character.” —NJ.com

“Each of the seven narratives in master storyteller Joyce Carol Oates’ collection, DIS MEM BER, takes readers on a disquieting trip through dark and paranoid minds. As the subtitle indicates, these are stories of mystery and suspense, and the psychological horror within does not disappoint.” —Bookreporter

From the Publisher