The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
Joyce Carol Oates, . . Harcourt/Penzler, $24 (275pp) ISBN 978-0-15-101179-7
As evidenced in this collection of nine stories, Oates's imagination is still fertile, feverish and macabre. These females are killers, either by their own hands or through manipulation. To be sure, they have provocation: abandonment, betrayal, abuse, the loss of reason to passion or obsession. In "Hunger," the longest and best of the stories, a rich but neglected corporate wife succumbs to a sexual obsession that ends in murder. Suspenseful and
Reviewed on: 09/19/2005
Genre: Fiction
Paperback - 288 pages - 978-0-15-603027-4
Paperback - 275 pages - 978-1-84724-036-1