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By Michael Upchurch
See the article in its original context from
February 13, 1994
,
Section 7, Page
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HAUNTED Tales of the Grotesque. By Joyce Carol Oates. 307 pp. New York: A William Abrahams Book/ Dutton. $21.95.
YEARS ago, when I was a bookstore clerk in midtown Manhattan, a fire broke out in our building. Black smoke poured out of the air-conditioning vents. It grew especially thick around the cash registers. We locked up the cash drawers, ready to run with them into the street.
But our customers were persistent. If they couldn't complete their purchases right now, would we place their books on hold until the fire was over? Why not go ahead with the transaction, since the conflagration didn't appear all that serious yet?
They seemed intent on giving a whole new meaning to the words "fire sale."
This episode came to mind after I read "Thanksgiving," a short story from Joyce Carol Oates's latest collection, "Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque," in which a similarly blinkered father and daughter do some desperate holiday grocery shopping in an A. & P. that is clearly suffering a mysterious brand of disaster:
"The next aisle was darkened and partly blocked by loosely strung twine. . . . Overhead, part of the ceiling was missing, too. You could look up into the interior of the roof, at the exposed girders. Rust-colored drops of water fell from the girders, heavy as shot."
Still, the shoppers forge ahead, picking through rotting vegetables, spoiled milk and toxic turkeys for their holiday meal ingredients.
Here and elsewhere Ms. Oates gleefully entwines the horrific and the homespun, more often than not eliciting goose bumps and a nervous laugh from her reader. The collection, with its emphasis on the grotesque (in her afterword, the author dryly defines the term as "the very antithesis of 'nice' "), doesn't attempt to match the variety of her splendid 1991 book "Heat and Other Stories," and a few of its selections feel thin or gimmicky. The closing tale, "Martyrdom" -- which culminates in a bizarre act of interspecies coitus -- may contain the most gruesome passage Ms. Oates has ever written, offering ample ammunition to anyone wanting to call her on her fascination with all things violent and degrading.
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