This book is a collection of eight essays. The first seven are each written on the subject of one of the "deadly" sins of sloth, anger, lust, gluttony, pride, avarice and envy. The eight is on despair. Each of the famous authors ruminates on the sin, looking at it from his or her unique perspective.

Overall I found the essays well written, and the book to be easy to read. This book makes for some lightweight reading, short and simple, but without much substance. Overall, I don't recommend it.

Eight essays on Sloth, Anger, Lust, Gluttony, Pride, Avarice, Envy, and Despair (yes that's 8 sins). To be honest I bought it because of Pynchon, (whose essay -if you are even a slight fan- makes the buy worth it) but read on to the back cover. I quickly discovered that these authors compiled around the topic of sins is a great way to see inside these writers styles and appraoch to a similar idea. Some I'd read before, and others introduced themselves in this novel. All were unique and interesting in their own right, especially for someone -me- who isn't terribly interested in sins. Highly reccomended!

Oates has taken some vintage American crimes and fictionalized them to shed light on the true "mysteries of Winterthurn" : The attitudes towards class and gender which make the true culprits and events highly explicable to the reader, but not to the inhabitants of Winterthurn. The aristocratic inhabitants of Winterthurn (the poorer ones don't matter) are willfully blind to facts which conflict with their images of each other, which enables a vicious sex killer to operate with ease, or for a lady to get away with crimes which would have been detected quickly if commited by a poor woman. The poor can be hired, fired, scapegoated, raped, even murdered at will, and the parallels between their economic vulnerability and degradation, and their vulnerability to violence is deftly handled. Oates' description of Riviere du Loup, the working class community which Winterthurn uses as a refuge dump and as a place where any crime may be commited against the lower class inhabitants by the wealthy young men of Winterthurn, is chilling and plausible.

And for the record : Ms Oates didn't merely go back and take old crimes and recast them event-for-event with her own fictional characters in the roles of murderer, victim, witness...Instead, she takes elements from many different crimes and recombines them. Recognizing the famous cases adds to the pleasure of the book. Here are some of the famous crimes which she used in the plotting of "Winterthurn":

The Lizzie Borden case,
The Hall-Mills murder case, aka the minister and the choir singer,
The Thomas Piper "Bat Belfry Murders",
The Leo Frank tragedy,
and I believe I detect traces of
Mary Rogers,
Theodore Durrant, and
Ruth Snyder-Judd Gray.

The distancing effect of the archaic language helps to make it clear to the reader that the plight of the poor and downtrodden has changed little in the decades gone by. The language will add to some reader's pleasure ; others will find it off putting. It requires the reader to really think about the information s/he is being given, as the narrator is the 'incompetent omniscient' : A third person narrator who knows everything, including the most private thoughts of the characters, but who misses entirely the truth of the crimes and the motives of the actors. This makes the portrait of Erasmus Kilgarven, one of the most evil villians in modern American literature, all the more horrific.

Fascinating book, when one considers that Oates is writing in the early 1980s in a retrospective style and language. She completely hits the Victorian mark. Don't expect "easy reading"-- this one takes time and committment, but it's worth it. Elements of horror, romance, and historical interest are blended in a fairly balanced manner. The first tale in this 'trilogy' of sorts gets bogged down a bit with all of the Kilgarvan family trivia, but it is essential to the rest of the tales. Work through it. Xavier Kilgarvan is truly one of the most unique and engaging (and pitiful) characters of all the detective/mystery genre. The most impressive aspect of this novel is that Oates leaves mysteries as mysteries. Meaning, she does not rend the veil of mystery in some hackneyed (though at times clever) manner, like so many writers in this genre (Doyle). The supernaturally strange events in Winterthurn remain shrouded (and as you will see, justifiably so) even after extensive examination and "ratiocination" (Oates' word). In the end, the Truth (if there be such a thing) is left for us to speculate. The importance (and the fun) lies in the journey, not in an unattainable destination!

Brutal murders, drug abuse, juvenile delinquency, satan worshippers -- yes, it's a new Joyce Carol Oates novel. Fresh from editing a collection of H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, Oates has been inspired to unleash upon the world a compelling series of nightmare incidents in the life of her protagonist, Ingrid Boone.Subtle it's not. The second half of the novel is full of campy scenes of grand guignol grossness that are so over-the-top they don't even try to suspend your disbelief. The prose is often fevered and ungrammatic, rattling on unpunctuated and uncontrolled like an uninspired parody of Faulkner. Most of the characters are caricatures at best, and their reductively Freudian motivations are appallingly simplistic.

Amazingly, though, much of the novel is successful. Many of the scenes in the first 150 pages are viscerally effective, the sort of images you remember for days after a really interesting nightmare. Also, the character of Ingrid is complex enough to sustain the reader's interest through much of the book, and the ending is surprisingly moving.

Some critics have been unnecessarily harsh on "Man Crazy", holding it to standards toward which it doesn't aspire. It's a potboiler, and a good one. Most of the themes were handled better in Oates's earlier novel "Foxfire", but "Man Crazy" is more fun. When Oates wants to, she can write serious and important novels like "We Were the Mulvaneys", but that's not the sort of thing she's writing here. This is Oates playing in Stephen King territory -- it's kind of like Pavarotti singing folk songs, but you'd probably never listen to folk songs (or Pavarotti) the same way again.

This story of a young girl's coming of age is both touching and horrifying. Ingrid is born to an attractive young couple whose world falls apart when the husband, an ex Vietnam War pilot, gets involved in a drug smuggling homicide and has to go into hiding. His absense, and the shabby conditions of her life with her mother, form the basis of a lifelong obsession with being needed by men. Ingrid's descent from precocious child to promiscous teenager to the ultimate degradation of being "dog-girl" to a satanic motorcylce cult, is told unflintchingly. Believable at every step, it is a painful and disturbing tale.

Oates style is like nothing I can remember recently. I don't know if this is typical of her books (this is the only one I have read) but she takes many liberties with syntax and punctuation, yet there is no sense of deliberately trying to be literary or arty and everything about the "voice" she chooses seems appropriate.

It would not be correct to say that I "enjoyed" this book, but I did find it moving, fascinating, and ultimately satisfying. I will be in search of other fiction by Joyce Carol Oates - after reading some lighter stuff first, just to get Satan's Children out of my mind.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of our best chroniclers of degradation. In MAN CRAZY, she examines what it took to be a female camp follower of someone like Charles Manson (here named Enoch Skaggs and relocated to Upstate New York).

Ingrid Boone grows up the daughter of a former aviator on the run and a good-time girl named Chloe who supplements her earnings by accepting money from well-off men who are "separated" from their wives. Even before the onset of puberty, Ingrid feels she must win approbation by offering sexual favors to the boys in her school. It is only a small step from there to becoming "Dog-Girl" for the sadistic Skaggs and his gang.

The scenes with Skaggs's gang take a strong stomach to read through, as a "traitor" named Gem is put to death by Enoch and as Ingrid is passed around from man to man and "punished" by being thrown naked into a cellar overflowing with rubbish and feces. There is enough will to live (but only just) for her to escape and find help after having been locked in there for days.

Oates is brilliant at showing us what horrors can lie behind the bland face of the pretty clerk who takes our applications or the receptionist who answers the phone and puts us on hold. The book ends with a now "rehabilitated" Ingrid looking at trees felled by a storm:

"They were alive, only not vertical. The heartbeat inside them had maybe slowed, only a murmur but if you squatted to listen, if you knew how to listen, if the wind would die down you would hear it."

In this novel, Oates writes with insight and sympathy about the destruction of an American family and their life as they knew it. The Mulvaneys - parents Mike and Corinne, children Mikey Jr., Patrick, Marianne, and Judd - to all outward appearances led an almost-charmed life on their farm near a small town in upstate New York. Mike owned a successful and well-established roofing company and Corinne managed the sometimes-raucous household with love,humor, and determination.

It took a while to get into this book, since the revelation of the background of this complex family went on for so long before any real action occurred. Although hinting of impending disaster, Oates, in a departure from her usual style, also wrote many descriptions of the normalcy and happiness of the Mulveneys, giving us a glowing view, seen through rose-colored glasses. Marianne was the *perfect* child, Mike Jr. was the hero, Patrick the brilliant one, and Judd was the baby.

After more than 100 pages, the real story begins when a terrible event in 1976 shatters their 'happy' lives. This event is the catalyst that tears apart Corinne's fantasy family and negatively impacts each member in a different way. Her husband, overwhelmed by anger and pain, lets his business slide, drowns his sorrows in alcohol, and alienates his friends while the children follow varying paths to cope (or not cope) with their grief and rage.

Spanning many years and following the roundabout route that brings the characters to their present plight, the book examines many ideas of the 50s through the 90s and looks closely at the changing American dream through these years. Oates writes with deep feeling on many themes, especially forgiveness. As a reader, I became intensely involved with the characters, their tragedy, and Oates' excellent writing.

While exposing the fragility and temporary nature of life as we know it, this challenging novel makes you care about the Mulveney family and get involved in the complexities of their lives.

The Oprah book club selections are certainly getting more complex!

This book will strike an immediate chord to a family 'putting on airs' yet within the house having its problems. It hithome for me and will most likely hit home for many others because we know of families that seem perfect.... and often we find out much later what was truly happening.

I do not believe that the choice of Mt. Ephraim as the hometown of the Mulvaneys was by accident. Ephraim and Manasseh were sons of Joseph - and while the latter committed heinous crimes against all moral authority, Ephraim was a redeemer. A striking metaphor against which much hurt is set - and one missed by the editorial reviewers.

This family functions quite well - all that we'd say is 'too good to be true' *is* actually true until Marianne, the girl so beautifully described that we actually *feel* she's the 'girl next door' to *us* is sexually assaulted. Actually, we are never told whether it was rape or consensual. And the beauty of this is that for the purposes of this story it doesn't matter.

It is the *effect* of the assault on the family that begins their descent. I will not spoil the book by telling you the details as to how each of the brothers and the parents fall off their respective wagons. But the cumulative effect is devasting, as told by the narrator, a now adult youngest brother Judd.

How can such a complete destruction of a classic nuclear family be a book I'd want to read? Because as someone once said, it is when a man stares into the abyss that he finds his character.

Suffice it to say that when you are done with this book you will feel as though you knew the Mulvaneys, suffered with them, and wonder how you would have reacted.

I believe everyone can relate to one or more of the characters in this book.

I also believe that this book is a *must* read.

If you want a book that will make you think realistically about life's challenges - and not give you answers, but rather present situations that make you think about how you would respond, this is the book for you.

The cliche that we learn more from our mistakes than our successes never applied more.

And all of us can probably stand to look at this side of life. As with 'The Dark Side of the Light Chasers', it is by looking at our human frailties and faults, shining the light on ourselves, warts and all, that we can come to true self-awareness.

After I finished what I would consider to be a masterpiece, I said to myself, "where the heck have you been that this is the first book you've read by this author." It took only 2 pages to hook me in. You know the feeling you get when you know right off the bat that you're going to love the book you just started -- that's how I felt with this one. The characters are so alive and you want more than anything for everything to be all right. You read each page with fearful expectation because you know it can't be. Oates has the ability of leading you to the end of the road but right before you get there she changes courses so that you still have to wait to see what's at the end of that road. To see the all-American dream family fall apart right before your eyes is somewhat depressing but it's also gratifying in the sadistic sense. The reaction of the father to the family tragedy was hard to believe but the reaction of the mother and the way she handled it was almost sinful. I wish I could remember the exact quote but somewhere in the book she refers to her husband as her "firstborn" instead of her "first love". Therein lies the true tragedy of We Were The Mulvaneys. Get this book for the summer and you'll have something you'll always remember the summer of 2000 for.

Joyce Carol Oates delivers more chills than thrills in her collection of short stories, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque. The characters are not natural born killers, but instead ordinary folks-they could be your next-door neighbors. They are unnerving for their familiarity. There's Florence Parr, the respected college professor, Sybil Blake, the innocent teenage girl, and Miss Jessel, the prim and proper governess, to name a few. Oates is skillful at taking an ordinary, even boring character such as these and subjecting her to a somewhat subtle torture chamber of events and psychological connections, eventually leading to a situation where our ordinary heroine (in almost every case, a female) is probably going to murder, but then the story is cut off suddenly, leaving the reader room to wonder. There's the chill. It's all what the reader knows, from a common theme of loneliness in part one, a single story of innocence in part two, stories of endearing human relationships, such as parenthood and marriage gone very wrong in part three, and finally ending with various glimpses of skewed, even futuristic, realities in part four. These stories whisper their incessant questions: What causes any of us to murder? Where's the line between sanity and insanity? How much insanity comes not from us, but from the world? Are we the people we think we are? How do we respond to madness in others? What is beyond our control? Oates gives the reader a delicious sense of What if?

And while these questions do much to spook us and the consistent tilt of reality indeed make us shiver, most of these stories stop short of real tension since the more you read them, the more you can see the ending a mile away. The formula is simple: Here's an ordinary person. Here's an ordinary person with ordinary flaws in an extraordinary situation. The ordinary person is driven to insanity. Any questions? In "The Premonition," Ellen Paxton undergoes this shift from sanity to insanity and enlists her children's help in killing her abusive husband. In the very next story, Julia Matterling of "Phase Change," emerges as a completely different, psychologically off-base woman after enduring her own onslaught of imagined abuse. Similarly, Sybil Blake takes revenge on her estranged father in "The Model." And, the mother in "The Guilty Party" comes to the point where she is ready to murder the man who abandoned her and her baby, Jocko. June Cleaver goes postal. Donna Reed goes on a rampage. There seems to be a desperate stretch for the gruesome-if it's horrible enough, it will be exciting, right? But, in the end, the boringness of repetition wins out over the shock appeal.

Furthermore, many of these stories are biased and hatred-filled in the most overly abused way. In every story (except "The White Cat" which could truly be argued either way), the man is the real villain, with our sympathies directed around the murdering heroine. We're led to believe that murder is the inevitable result of abuse and that abuse is almost always the result of simply being with a man, be it your husband or your estranged lover or the sleazy abortionist or even the demon-possessed two-year-old son. In "Extenuating Circumstances," the very title suggests that the narrator, who has killed her own child, is somehow excused because of the child's father's slighting her: "Because there was shame in it. Loving you knowing you would not love me enough," (148). Perhaps the most objectionable use of this gender-based hatred is seen in the last story, "Martyrdom" in which the husband cruelly sexually abuses his wife. (And may I add that this story seeks to be disgusting just for the point of being disgusting. It's absolutely vile.) It's hard to tell if Oates is genuinely concerned with the position of women in society or if she is simply looking to excuse every criminal act completed by a woman, past, present, or future.

While these stories are well crafted in some respects, bringing the reader to icy depths of character psychoanalysis, they lack in any real variety of plot or situation. While the reader may find them vaguely satisfying on one level, it is not a level most of us want to operate continually, especially for the duration of three hundred and some pages. Their persistent caricature of the abusive man and the revengeful woman is trying, boring, and irritating. In short, I think there's so much better out there to read-why waste your time?

The monsters who inhabit the sixteen stories that make up "Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque", by Joyce Carol Oates are not the creatures we typically associate with horror, but more frighteningly are people we encounter daily - husbands, fathers, mothers, and wives. Oates seems to delight in luring us into an innocent and familiar world, filled with people we recognize and trust, then locking the door and cutting off all of the lights. When our eyes adjust to the darkness, what we see and experience is a perversion of the reality we thought we knew.

The stories seem to become increasingly horrific as they go from the first to the last in the collection. It's as if Oates felt obliged to keep raising the stakes; as our sensibilities absorbed the shock of one story, she took us to a new level of terror with the next.

Ms. Oates raises the horror quotient by making her villains people or places we thought we knew. The first story in the collection, "Haunted", centers around the friendship of two twelve-year old girls who live in the country and share a fondness for exploring abandoned places. Ms. Oates captures the feelings of preadolescent angst and hands them back to us effortlessly. Just when we relax and think this is just a coming of age story with an edge, Ms. Oates twists it into a real life horror story with sexual abuse and murder. In "The Doll," a woman's memories of the dollhouse that occupied many hours of her childhood, begin to haunt her when she stumbles on what she believes to be its real-life replica. In "The White Cat", an adoring husband blames the distance growing between he and his young and beautiful wife on her white Persian cat. The cat in this story proves true the adage that cat's have nine lives. Too late, the husband learns he's only got one. We are instantly suspicious of Mr. Starr, the older gentlemen who befriends the young woman in "The Model", in spite of his many acts of kindness. We watch with horror as the young woman, against her better instincts, is drawn into his web. In "Extenuating Circumstances" and "The Guilty Party", Ms. Oates shows us how anger towards the men that abandoned them can turn mothers into monsters. "The Premonition" is aptly named since the horror in that tale is suggested rather than told, felt rather than realized. We watch as a lovely woman and her cheerful daughters, pretend that all is well, while offering shabby excuses regarding the notable absence of the man of the house (who no one - not even the brother who dropped in for a visit - will miss), all the while washing up large pans and knives and tying off large garbage bags. The collection culminates with "Martyrdom", a story so grotesque I truly wish I'd never read it.

Reading "Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque" is an exhausting experience. Ms. Oates gives us, quite adeptly, narratives with themes of betrayal, rape, child abuse and murder. Such themes become tiresome as we come to the end of the collection. But like the onlooker who drives slowly by a grisly accident scene, to catch a glimpse of something he knows he'd rather not see, Ms. Oates writing compels us to keep reading. I couldn't help thinking that like a gansta-rap CD that conveys its message in language some sensibilities can't handle, the book should bear a warning sticker stating "READER BEWARE: NOT FOR THE FAINTHEARTED."

But also notice: Joyce Carol Oates. It's disturbing. And, it's not for everyone. It's for open-minded readers, who seriously want to feel creeped out from every purposeful nuance of the tight, economic text of one of America's premier gothicists. If you want to feel your skin crawl, eyes half-blinded by a stagnant North American summer sun as your mind revels in the paranoid, sickly reality next door, then you'll like this.
Some of her greatest horror stories of the past decade are in this collection, most of which aren't easy to find elsewhere.

One of those collections that cuts up larger works.