‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ by Joyce Carol Oates

This isn’t a horror story but is certainly horrific. Arnold Friend is a monstrous fake teenager fashioned from hair lacquer and denim. When he decides to take Connie, a teenage girl, he stalks, seduces and seizes her while her well-to-do parents are out at a barbecue. It distils a huge amount into a few thousand words, making small town America a menacing, sickly place.

I came to it via The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories (ed. Tobias Wolff, 1994) but knew the story obliquely from Don Moser’s 1966 newspaper article ‘The Pied Piper of Tucson’, about the real-life murderer Charles Schmid, which inspired Oates. Schmid uses to put crushed drinks cans in his shoes as makeshift lifts and similarly Oates has her Arnold Friend standing and walking strangely, as if he’s a simulacrum of a human.

This year also happened to see the resurfacing of Joyce Chopra’s 1985 excellent film Smooth Talk, the final act of which is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Oates’s story, with Treat Williams as Arnold Friend and Laura Dern as Connie.

‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ is also a story that makes you look askance at Arthur ‘The Fonz’ Fonzarelli – gritty Happy Days reboot for Netflix, anyone?

First published in Epoch, Autumn 1966, and frequently anthologised since