joyce carol oates haunted tales of the grotesque

Oates’s own engagement with this tradition was evidenced in her early collection Night-Side (1977), which gathers 18 stories (including the title tale, an evocative exploration of occult research) that treat themes of haunting, dark obsession, and morbid diablerie.

In a 1998 essay on “The Aesthetics of Fear,” she laid out a wide-ranging view of horror literature as a cathartic genre: by evoking “an artful simulation” of an emotion that is “crude, inchoate, nerve-driven and ungovernable,” such fiction helps readers confront their own “recurring and compulsive nightmares.” As her fine 1996 anthology American Gothic Tales, which traces a lineage from Charles Brockden Brown to Stephen King, makes clear, Oates sees the grotesque and uncanny as central to the American literary tradition. Lovecraft, writing movingly about how their fiction, with its focus on “the interior of the soul,” links personal fears and anxieties with visions of cosmic dread. The author has openly acknowledged her debts to Edgar Allan Poe and H.

A SIGNIFICANT PORTION of the huge literary output of Joyce Carol Oates has been cast in a Gothic mode.

Joyce carol oates haunted tales of the grotesque