‘Thanksgiving’ by Joyce Carol Oates

Oates can command any genre in which she chooses to write, it seems (or which chooses her through which to express itself}, yet her tales of the weird are often overshadowed, in the collective critical eye, by her more politically engaged, directly accessible stuff. To this reader, however, her ‘dark fiction’ pieces are amongst the very best in the field. In this, a young girl, through whose eyes we see, is taken by her father on a Thanksgiving shopping trip in a world which has somehow slipped sideways into pure nightmare. In a supermarket lifted out of an insane brain, the girl hopes her father is not muttering a prayer under his breath because ‘it would have made me disgusted to hear. The age I was, you don’t want to hear any adult, let alone your father, yes and your mother, maybe most of all your mother, praying aloud to God to help them, because you know, when you hear such a prayer, there won’t be any help’.

Shudder.

First published in Omni, December 1993, and then in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, E. P. Dutton, 1994

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

Crafted with sharp, simmering tension and a relentless, dread-like momentum, Joyce Carol Oates’ 1966 story has become a contemporary classic. Fifteen-year-old Connie is a typical teenage girl: concerned with her looks, self-conscious, struggling with strained parental relationships. When a stranger arrives, who may not be exactly who he says he is, the story’s conclusion begins to feel inevitable, even pre-ordained. The story has a dreamlike quality that verges horrifyingly into nightmare as it illuminates the specific vulnerabilities of the teenage girl.

First published in the Fall 1966 edition of Epoch magazine, collected in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories, Vanguard, 1970 and widely anthologised

‘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

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

It’s a beautiful day at the height of summer. Connie, fifteen years old, is all alone in the garden, her parents having left her home alone for the day. The “sky was perfectly blue and still”. So, what could go wrong? Everything, of course.

In this story by Joyce Carol Oates there are so many corners at which you’ll be surprised, nonetheless you’re waiting and you’re dreading, always about to have your worst fears realised. The tension is notched up and up and up. The young protagonist, Connie, so adeptly drawn in the seemingly aimless opening, finds herself on the brink of something terrible when a stranger calls.

This stranger is both monstrous and normal. His name is Arnold Friend, which even by itself is creepy. And what follows might well be the best dramatization of the male sexual aggressor: the brow-beating, the oily sweet-talk, the intimidation, the magic of his patter: the gross implausibility and plausibility both. The story is compelling because it is terrible. And it’s terrible because this is just what happens every day. That’s the beauty of this story: it’s the same old story made new.

The way menace is built up in the story, so gently, is itself quite scary. The reader’s experience – not knowing what’s happening, but at the same time knowing all too well – mirrors the young girl’s experience. Just as we are compelled, so too is she. Just as she is caught in the inevitable ways of this world, and the way people are, so too are we. It works as sweetly as a well-tuned Greek tragedy. But the catharsis is contaminated, tainted by our own complicity.

It’s a great short story because it defamiliarises so expertly, showing that the great short story has great utility; great literature does a job; the world is given back to us anew. And it’s more than disturbing when we re-realise that we live in a world like this.

Chosen by Peter Ahern. Peter Ahern is a teacher and reader. Blogs about short stories, long stories and reading at www.onehundredpages.wordpress.com. Find him on Twitter at @ahernahern

First published in Epoch, Fall 1966. Collected in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories, Vanguard, 1970 and widely anthologised

‘The White Cat’ by Joyce Carol Oates

There was a gentleman of independent means who, at about the age of fifty-six, conceived of a passionate hatred for his much-younger wife’s white Persian cat.

A highlight among highlights from Joyce Carol Oates’ brilliant Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque collection, ‘The White Cat’ is the story of Julius, a wealthy man in his late fifties who does not need to work, and his much younger wife; she spends a lot of her time with her circle of theatre friends in the city, leaving him alone to collect his rare antiques and ponder why he still feels unsatisfied, despite having accrued everything he considers necessary for a successful life. Adding to his woes is Miranda, the white Persian cat he bought for his wife, who seems to like everyone except Julius and will not let him stroke her or come anywhere near here. Julius is annoyed – didn’t he buy the cat, and bestow it to his wife as a gift? So why does the cat not show him any affection? He owns the cat, right?

So, Julius decides to kill Miranda, attempting to make it look like an accident. The cat doesn’t die, returning from the grave again and again, much to Julius’s distress…

‘The White Cat’ is one of those great stories that is absurdly funny, genuinely creepy, and one that can be interpreted in several different ways – is Julius simply transferring his feelings towards his wife onto the cat, or is there something genuinely wrong with the animal? Often lauded as a highlight of feminist horror short-fiction, this was the story that made me understand why Oates is considered such an important writer.

First published in A Matter of Crime, Harcourt Brace, 1987; collected in Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, Penguin/Plume, 1995