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Joyce Carol Oates is unquestionably prolific. She has more than 100 books to her name (novels, novellas, short stories), and at 65 is a serious contender for the Nobel Prize. Like any great writer, she has also profoundly divided critical opinion.
Last year a reviewer enthused: "If Joyce Carol Oates published a shopping list you would have to read it - she would be sure to present her groceries in some new and stunning light." But Truman Capote had a different opinion: "To me, she's the most loathsome creature in America. She's a joke monster who ought to be beheaded in a public auditorium."
But back to the present. How does she acquit herself in her latest collection of short stories, The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense (Quercus, £12.99)?
A book of spooks and terror is
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The prolific Joyce Carol Oates turns her literary talents to horror. tim auld isn’t that convinced
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always to be welcomed, and this is a great genre with too few truly blood-curdling proponents.
The ingredients of grimness are all there in Oates' collection, with a great cast of sympathetic but strong-willed women: the cowed wife who turns the tables on her drunken husband; the jealous child who carries her baby brother onto a rooftop; the shopaholic who bullies a shopgirl once too often; the nurse who "mercifully" dispatches her terminally ill patients.
But where's the twist to make a tale of the unexpected? The turn that makes the screw bite? Not here. Oates is briefly good in "Tell Me You Forgive Me", a moving tale of a mother's guilt. But apart from a - comparatively tame - Brett Easton Ellis-style riff involving the grotesque use of a stiletto heel, there's little here to turn the stomach or trouble the psyche. 
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POSTED MAY 23, 2006
LA stories with a twist
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