I Am No One You Know by Oates
I Am No One You Know: Stories (2004)
by Joyce Carol Oates
290 pages - Ecco
This recent short story collection from Oates contains nineteen stories, separated into four sections. Most of them are fairly short, running from ten to twenty pages. The majority take place in Upstate New York, on the south shore of Lake Ontario. The usual obsessions of Oates are here, with almost every single story involving some kind of violence or brutal murder or sexual abuse -- often all of them combined. There's a sense of dread at the start of every story that could put this in the 'non-supernatural horror' category.
These stories are really good, some of them terrific, but when you read several at a time the violence and ugliness can get to be a bit much. Unlike in a novel, in a short story you don't get a lot of space to paint different sides of a character, and different times in their lives, so one in-family drunken raging murder seems to blend in with the previous in-family drunken raging murder. Sometimes I wonder if Oates has trouble letting us get to know a character without sticking in a brutal death or rape somewhere. The gruesomeness starts to seem like a cheap way to provoke a response from the reader.
Not to get too negative, because I did quite enjoy the book. My favourite stories were -- 'Cumberland Breakdown,' about a brother and sister who slowly edge further and further towards killing the white-trash family in whose house their father (a volunteer fireman) died when he was trying to fight a fire; and 'Three Girls,' an unusually quiet and low-key story in which two young women spot Marilyn Monroe shopping undercover in a New York City used book store, and quietly observe her without getting too close. Also notable is 'The Mutants' which is about one woman caught in a building near the World Trade Center during September 11th.
by Joyce Carol Oates
290 pages - Ecco
This recent short story collection from Oates contains nineteen stories, separated into four sections. Most of them are fairly short, running from ten to twenty pages. The majority take place in Upstate New York, on the south shore of Lake Ontario. The usual obsessions of Oates are here, with almost every single story involving some kind of violence or brutal murder or sexual abuse -- often all of them combined. There's a sense of dread at the start of every story that could put this in the 'non-supernatural horror' category.
These stories are really good, some of them terrific, but when you read several at a time the violence and ugliness can get to be a bit much. Unlike in a novel, in a short story you don't get a lot of space to paint different sides of a character, and different times in their lives, so one in-family drunken raging murder seems to blend in with the previous in-family drunken raging murder. Sometimes I wonder if Oates has trouble letting us get to know a character without sticking in a brutal death or rape somewhere. The gruesomeness starts to seem like a cheap way to provoke a response from the reader.
Not to get too negative, because I did quite enjoy the book. My favourite stories were -- 'Cumberland Breakdown,' about a brother and sister who slowly edge further and further towards killing the white-trash family in whose house their father (a volunteer fireman) died when he was trying to fight a fire; and 'Three Girls,' an unusually quiet and low-key story in which two young women spot Marilyn Monroe shopping undercover in a New York City used book store, and quietly observe her without getting too close. Also notable is 'The Mutants' which is about one woman caught in a building near the World Trade Center during September 11th.