This collection of, yes, haunting and grotesque tales finds the author in a dark, ironic, frequently unkind mood. Which is just another Tuesday for Joyce Carol Oates.As always, her mastery of the art is on full display. I always find it a treat when a writer decides to match their prose to their protagonist's state of mind. And so Haunted features often mannered writing styles that are repressed and introspective ("Haunted"), desperately chatty ("The Bingo Master"), or that feel like a vindictiv...

Okay, yeah, me loving a Joyce Carol Oates collection is nothing new at this point, but Haunted is officially my favorite (so far), beating out Give Me Your Heart. Every story is a banger, a slam dunk. Of course some hit me harder than others, some will stick with me longer, some I feel are perhaps a bit more technically proficient (though JCO is certainly a master wordsmith), some I suspect will linger in my subconscious. But all are well worth reading, experiencing. Written and published over a...

As a fan of The Melvins, I've long since gotten used to their penchant for suddenly ending songs just when they sound like they're really getting underway. And, I was quickly reminded of this aspect of their music while reading Joyce Carol Oates' stories of murder and bloodshed, which often share that truncated quality. However, when The Melvins cut a song off, they simply proceed onto the next one without any demand on listeners to understand what they have just heard. This is not quite the cas...

Joyce Carol Oates' Haunted is an excellent collection of stories that, for the lack of a better word, are "scary". However, these are not "scary" in the sense that Edgar Allan Poe or H.P Lovecraft are. These tales are much more like the plot of an episode of Twilight Zone with a twist at the end. As other reviewers have stated, her stories range from traditional scary stories that could to told on Halloween, to creepy tales with psychological implications, to horrific passages of violence.The ma...

HAUNTED: Tales of the Grotesque• Haunted ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐• The Doll ⭐⭐⭐• The Bingo Master ⭐⭐• The White Cat ⭐⭐⭐• The Model ⭐⭐⭐⭐• Extenuating Circumstances ⭐⭐• Don't You Trust Me? ⭐⭐• The Guilty Party ⭐⭐• The Premonition ⭐⭐⭐• Phase Change ⭐⭐• Poor Bibi ⭐⭐• Thanksgiving ⭐⭐⭐• Blind ⭐⭐⭐⭐• The Radio Astronomer ⭐⭐• Accursed Inhabitants of the House of Bly ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐• Martyrdom ⭐⭐⭐Afterword: 'On the Grotesque'

Somehow, in some indescribable way, Joyce’s words and stories in Haunted changed me, soaked into my DNA and made me something different than I was before. And I like it.

I was interested in reading something in the spirit of the season (Halloween) so I picked up this book of short stories, which ranged from creepy to downright disgusting. As an author, Joyce Carol Oates shows an uncanny ability to come up with strikingly different situations within which she weaves remarkable tales. With Oates, you never know what you're going to get because each story is completely different than the one before.However, what is the same about each of the stories in this book is...

Mostly good or great, all unsettling, a few wonderfully horrifying.The Doll was probably my favorite of the bunch. The terror is slow and before you know it, it has surrounded you and drifted over your head from which there is no way out. Mega heebie-jeebies. The Bingo Master, Thanksgiving and The White Cat were fantastic as well.

Joyce Carol Oates is a fantastic writer, but I think what this anthology shows is that good writing does not always lead to a good story. At best, some of these stories (particularly the finale "Martyrdom") are engaging, full of twisted and nightmarish scenes, containing an element of social commentary... but not really satisfying in terms of a beginning, middle, and end; like a series of scenes that exist to create a feeling but not to function as a tale. Poetry in prose form.At their worst, an...

Heard nothing but glittering reviews for anything and everything by Oates. Perhaps I set the bar too high because I was mildly disappointed. I liked the writing style well enough but I was honestly bored and kept falling asleep while reading, halfway through I just kept hoping the next story would be the one that would validate the book for me. I wasn't expecting scary, but I just wanted the stories to go a little farther, a little something more. I am intrigued enough and plan on reading more w...

This is my second time through this collection, and it was even more amazing the second time around. I first encounter Joyce Carol Oates when I read her story - her gruesome story, both emotionally and physically - "Martyrdom" in the collection METAHORROR, edited by Dennis Etchison. It knocked me out, big time, so when I happened upon HAUNTED, I snapped it right up.Excellent stories. Some with a twist of the supernatural, some with a twist of the knife, and some just bizarre. All of them about f...

The first two stories were really good, particularly "The Doll," but it was all downhill from there with the exception of "The White Cat" (a re-imagining of Poe's The Black Cat.) If it weren't for the first two, I would have given this book only one star. Her endings are often weak and the stories just didn't do anything for me - in fact they often pissed me off because they were so ridiculous. After getting half way through the second to the last story (a re-imagining of A Turn of the Screw) I

Very gripping stuff. Some of the stories are so twisted that I winced in reading them...but I kept reading.

Violence Against Women: The Book! Now with more rape, torture, and dead babies for your $$!

This collection of short stories is uneven, but its best stories are quite strong. Oates is exploring horror here, but she mostly avoids standard genre thrills, instead aiming for psychological horror and unease instead of physical danger or supernatural threats (though those do make appearances as well). One repeated theme is repressed (often sexual) needs or truths breaking through the persona a protagonist has constructed for themselves. This is strongly handled in "Haunted" - where traumatic...

Obviously I am in the minority with my rating, and I'm ok with that. Very few times in my life has a book pissed me off so much that I wanted to burn it on the spot. This book will forever live on my DNF shelf, and I will likely never read anything by JCO again. Granted, I only made it through two of the stories in this collection, but it was enough to know I just don't care for the author, or more specifically her writing style.

I rather enjoyed this collection. I felt that there were a few stories that lagged on a bit, but overall I found the stories to be either slightly or extremely disturbing. Looking forward to reading more Oates in the future!

Classic Oates: uneasy stories, unlikable characters, indeterminate endings. Amusingly, one story is essentially fanfic (though I guess with an author of Oates' stature one has to call it an homage or a riff or something): Henry James' Turn of the Screw retold from Jessel and Quint's perspective. Best part was Oates' afterword, where she says this:One criterion for horror fiction is that we are compelled to read it swiftly, with a rising sense of dread, and so total a suspension of ordinary skept...

Weird... I skimmed over my JCO "to read" list and wondered why I hadn't not marked this collection as read. I will never forget reading the last story, "Martyrdom", during my lunch at work. Warning: do not read this wrenching story while eating. The vivid, lurid descriptions made me nauseous... needless to say I didn't want to finish my meal. Trust JCO to make me almost cry over a rat's fate.The post-apocalyptic tale "Thanksgiving" is also one not to read while eating. Come to think of it, with

I was really into horror books growing up. When I was in eighth grade, my mom checked this one out from the library, read it, and passed it on to me. I remember being totally engrossed by these stories. However, when I think back on what they were about, I can hardly see what my mom thought was appropriate about this book for a 13 year-old! Ah well, the fact that she didn't censor, or dumb things down for me is probably a major reason that we got along growing up. Still...Be prepared for grotesq...

Wow... My husband and I decided to read this collection of macabre tales together, and after wading through story after story, I have to say that Ms. Oates truly knows how to terrify people.My favorite stories in the book were those that were ambiguous and subtle, ending up like a Rorschach test for people who interpret the story differently. My favorite such tale was the first, a story about a deadly haunting (or perhaps not a haunting at all?). Some of the more gruesome tales involve rape or c...

Goodreads should adjust the star system. Rather than stars meaning 'really liked it' they should be geared to judge the quality of the writing. These tales really were grotesque. 'Really liked it' isn't exactly the way I would phrase my feelings towards it.

As someone who reads a lot of horror, I had reached the point where I thought nothing could shock me. Then I read Phase Change. One of the most disturbing stories I've ever read. Haunted, The Doll, The Premonition, Thanksgiving, and Martyrdom are also particularly effective.

There are a couple misses but more than a few big hits in this collection, including my favorite JCO short story, "The Doll," which I think is clearly (and somewhat humorously) autobiographical.

Oates is hardcore, to say the least. This is not a collection for the weak at heart or squeamish.

Well that was interesting.....

This collection gets off to a really strong start. The title story, and to a lesser extent the one after, The Doll, is a disorienting and unsettling tale, with intoxicating prose and a really engrossing narrator. Unfortunately the rest of the collection resonated less with me than I'd hoped after those initial high-water marks. They're an ambitious and diverse set of stories, and the way they experiment feels a lot more compelling to me than the structural exercises of John Langan's short storie...

These stories are at times — there is no other way of putting it — brutish and nasty. The discomfort is part of the point. In her afterward, Oates asks, “why do these seemingly repellent states of mind possess, for some, a biting attraction?" Engaging with these reactions, both being repulsed and attracted, is part of the surreal experience of this book.Readers expecting something only pleasurably spooky beware.NotesShe will make one of her droll charming anecdotes out of the experience. She wil...

[rating = B]This is my first Joyce Carol Oates; I had decided to avoid her novels and so thought that short stories would be a good way to observe her writing style. Most of the stories are purely Metaphor; by this I mean that a woman might have a child that abuses her but it is really just her unconscious, or a family will be burying an animal/human and it will actually be how people treat their other people or even their own children. This is not problematic, but sometimes, Miss Oates does not...

https://thebookloversboudoir.wordpres...JCO is one of my favourite writers but she’s not always perfect. I didn’t enjoy this collection as much as others I’ve read. The opening story, Haunted is bleak and monstrous and the stand-out piece in this collection. None of the other stories reach this one’s level of amazing and many fell quite short. Judging by the title and blurb I thought I was going to be reading horror stories and dark gothic tales. That’s not quite the case. Many the stories are j...