Tales Of Revenge, Madness, Humiliation, Coming To Consiousness, Pain!

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	• Will You Always Love Me?: And Other Stories Joyce Carol Oates Plume, 1997 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 6 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Joyce Carol Oates does it again!

Joyce Carol Oates's short-story collections get better and better each time I pick one up. This is one of the most beautiful, haunting, dark collections ever written. This time Oates tackles American life with unflinching honesty. The stories in this collection touched me to the core. Oates has such a vivid, incredible imagination. My favorite stories are "You Petted Me, and I Followed You Home," "The Missing Person," "The Girl Who Was to Die," "The Goose Girl," "The Brothers," and "The Vision." Some of the stories are poignant, others have a touch of humor and there are those that are all out sinister. One thing is certain: they are all dark and thought provoking. Joyce Carol Oates is one of my favorite authors. Her lurid tales haunt me long after reading them. I cannot wait to read one of her full-length novels. I cannot recommend Will You Always Love Me? enough.

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Excellent!

This is a superb collection from one of the greatest short-story writers. Stories like 'Handclasp' and 'Mark of Satan' are certainly on par with the best of Oates' more famous stories: 'In the region of Ice' or 'Heat'.

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Master Stories from a Master Storyteller

Joyce Carol Oates has really outdone herself with this collection. These stories are wonderful and are Oates at the top of her game. Each story is so well crafted and hauting, she gives you little slices of American life, each one revealing a different aspect of that life. She usually focuses on some seamliness, something dark, something sinister, but manages to keep the stories enjoyable to read. I highly recommend this collection. Oates fans will not be disappointed and for those who are not familiar with her work, it is the perfect introduction.

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Unexpected truths (Review contains a spoiler)

I enjoyed these stories, but the one I found most memorable, the one I could relate to was "The Goose Girl." It's amazing to me how life seems to know where we all are most vulnerable, and what some of us are most afraid of, that realization that "we ain't all of that."
I was in that room with the title female character of "The Goose Girl." I was there with her as she hung up the telephone with a stunned look on her face. Didn't she know? The person you most truly need, you most truly want, you ain't gon get.

Tales Of Revenge, Madness, Humiliation, Coming To Consiousness, Pain!

In Will You Always Love Me, the flawless Joyce Carol Oates reversed a decade-long trend of writing explorations of the many facets of love among late-century couples, by returning to the delightfully complicated sorts of tales she reveled in during the early 1980's. These dyed-in-the-wool Gothic stories, set amid the familiar miscellanae of modern life, compel the reader to see existence within American society from a point of view slanted toward the harsh secret mindscapes that are concealed within each and every one of us, no matter how shallow we might outwardly appear. By establishing us as concealed voyeurs who look on into the lives of the characters in these tales, and by stripping us of our acceptance of the mundane majority of daily goings-on, we pass with Oates' aid into a state of hyper-realization and see things in these stories better than those who dwell within them: we see things as they ARE. No other writer achieves this quite as skillfully as Joyce Carol Oates. My favorite among these stories was the one in which the still-attractive middle-aged neighbor woman plotted a sexual liaison with a teenage boy she believes she has seduced. The rather frightened boy timidly admits to his mother what the woman has planned, and the mother, with the strategic brilliance of a maternal warrior set on protecting her offspring, expertly arranges the other woman's abject humiliation and in the process no doubt crumbles the would-be temptress' self-image to its heavily made-up foundations. That is viciousness doled out with a minimalism that is an Oatesean trademark. This story and nearly two-dozen others await inside Will You Always Love Me, Joyce Carol Oates' finest collection in many years.

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