The present volume is similarly divided, into 10 previously uncollected recent stories and 25 earlier ones, published from the 1960s through the 1990s and reprinted from several of Oates's collections.
Of the former, three offer variations on countless renderings of the consequences of sexual violence. A mother fears her rigorous disciplinary methods provoked the ``sluttishness" that led to her daughter's rape and murder (``The Fish Factory"). A teenager returning from school fails to realize that her mother has just murdered her father (``In Hot May").
Adolescent paranoia and fragility are efficiently dramatized, however, in the taut account of a lonely high school boy's passive complicity -- and empathy -- with his father's crimes (``Spider Boy") and in a provocative fantasy about a failing student's complex fantasy life (``*BD*11 1 87"). Oates ranges further in the title story, which depicts revenge undertaken on behalf of a hapless aged farmer ensnared in a vice sting, and to more chilling effect in ``The Lost Brother," which skillfully deploys breathless narration and ratcheting suspense in the story of a bereaved woman's brutally disappointed quest for a reunion with her possibly mad older brother.
But why did Oates include ``Fat Man My Love," a tasteless portrayal of unhinged sexuality and the perverse fascination it engenders in an ``Ice Blonde" starlet ? This is fanzine stuff, worthy to stand beside only Oates's forgettable fictionalization of Marilyn Monroe's life in her best selling 2000 novel ``Blonde." The less said about this ludicrously sad story, the better.
