This is one of the all-time, hands-down, best novels ever written about psychoanalysis. Dawn, a brilliant, artistic college student is still emotionally crippled and self-destructive after four years of treatment with an incompetent therapist when she’s referred to the office of Dr. Lulu Shinefeld, a 40-year-old Manhattanite, who’s own life is a chronicle of bad judgement and accommodation. Gradually, the women work together to uncover the mystery of Dawn’s disease. Dawn is haunted by her own artistic renderings, and her wild and terrifying associations but Lulu’s compassionate neutrality gives her the strength to go out into the world and find the people who hold the clues to her early life trauma. We hear about the death of her parents when she’s an infant, her subsequent unconventional parenting, the previous clueless shrink and her current string of lovers, but amazingly none of these turn out to be the culprit. Lulu’s adventures outside of the office show her humanity and vulnerability and helps us appreciate the baggage she has to carry (and ignore) when she sits in the analyst’s chair. The two women apply their arsenals to tackle the demons that keep Dawn from being able to function and over the five years of therapy both patient’s transference and clinician’s counter-transference evolve to ameliorate Dawn’s psychic pain. The analysis not only strengthens and heals Dawn, but edifies, in a triumphant denouement, both therapist and patient. August was written in the early 80’s, so ignore whatever irritating hackneyed concepts and dated rhetoric might impede the real suspense and wonder of the story. It’s unfortunately out of print but get it from a used book dealer or library (or borrow it from me).

Theresa was a quietly satisfied young teacher by day. But when the sun went down, her life was an endless, faceless whirl of bars and beds and men she'd never seen before and wouldn't see again. If she couldn't find love, she took chances on men who were better than no men at all. And learned, with each new night and each new nightmare, that finding her man was only the beginning.

An emotional and somewhat depraved read, I've had an exceptionally difficult time putting my feelings about this anthology into words. I've done my best to try and come back to this review all articulate and concise. But...I...just can't!! There are a lot of stories in this collection and they reach all the way into the deepest recesses of our minds to pull and tweak those dark thoughts that we all have. I felt angry, depressed, uncomfortable, sad, disgusted and completely wrecked throghout this anthology. which is why it took me sooo long to read it. It just wasn't something I could keep plowing through without feeling like I was giving up part of my soul in the process. Then again, Joyce Carol Oates has a knack for doing that. She very much reminds me of something that Clive Barker said in an interview I watched, I can't remember the EXACT wording, but it's essentially something along these lines:\
  "People wonder what kind of sick depraved person I have to be to be able to come up with some of the ideas I've had. The thing is that we're all sick and depraved and we need to express that in some way. It's the people that never express it, that stay quiet, that you really need to worry about."\
That kept coming to mind over and over again as I read this anthology because, I realized, that this is exactly what Oates did. She accepted not only that part of her psyche, but also accepted the fact that it's in every person's psyche. Whether they acknowledge it or not. Unfortunately there is just no way for me to review the individual stories in here. I just wouldn't know where to begin. But I would definitely recommend this anthology, as well as anything by Oates, to those that can take a dive into the dark and deep side of their mind and still be able to come out the other side not completely messed up.Just....Wow...

A thrilling and resonant novel from the author of Away, about loyalty, ambition, and the pleasures and perils of family, set in 1940s America.When Eva's mother abandons her on Iris's front porch, the girls don't seem to have much in common - except, they soon discover, a father. Thrown together with no mothers to care for them and a father who could not be considered a parent, Iris and Eva become one another's family. Iris wants to be a movie star; Eva is her sidekick. Together, they journey across 1940s America from scandal in Hollywood to the jazz clubs and golden mansions of Long Island, stumbling, cheating and loving their way through a landscape of war, betrayals and big dreams.

Josie S- has come with her mother Delia to live in her great-aunt Esther Burkhardt's house in upstate New York. Also living there is Josie's cousin, Jared, Jr., on leave from the Presbyterian seminary. Preoccupied with his studies, impeccably dressed in his starched white shirts, distant and mysterious, Jared, Jr. is an intriguing figure to Josie's curious and impressionable young mind. One summer afternoon, when Josie encounters Jared, Jr. at the riverbank behind the Burkhardt house, dark secrets are shared between them as an unnatural love blooms. A moody sense of foreboding grips the reader from page one as religion, whispers of dark family secrets, violations of trust and virginity, bad blood, and a hint of incest all haunt the landscape of this startling tale of divided family loyalties, psychological manipulation, and the tangled strands of love and fear in the mind of a young girl groping for her way in one fractured American family.

Like many of Joyce Carol Oates' "lesser" books, this was so much stronger than the average book out there--the writing is so supple and precise, and the characterizations are so apt you laugh out loud. She is the current heavyweight champion of the American social novel, our Balzac... This is a lightweight compared with books like Blonde or We Were the Mulvaneys, an "entertainment"--as Graham Greene used to say of his ravishing but lesser books--it's a comic novel on the level of Bonfire of the Vanities but less cruel. Just what I was in the mood for.Middle Age examines the Updike territory-- the interlocking lives of often awful middle-aged, privileged denizens in the small historic town of Salthill-on-Hudson, and how many of them are thrown into crisis by the death of a beloved neighbor (and dream-lover of many of the local wives). Oates has a savage, scalpel-sharp understanding of these people and yet at the same time can empathize with their struggles--a wonderful brew. Loved how all the characters wear their middle age--these awful, suffering people and their awful children. The only happy man is the dead guy, Adam Berendt, a sculptor escaping a mysterious past.Everyone's story is told from their own point of view. There's Marina Troy, the bookseller and youngest of the Salthill ladies in love with Berendt, and Abigail des Pres, the divorcee obsessed with her sullen son, a beauty secretly desired by all the men in town, and Augusta Cutler, the ripe Rubenesque sexpot. There's Camille Hoffman, the soulful housewife. There's Adam's (and everyone's) lawyer Roger Cavanaugh, the uneasy "free man" an awful and delightful character whose relationship with women is tortured and full of twists... the secret protagonist of the book. Various husbands also go into a spin in theirshock at Adam's death--for many he was their only confidant and non-"Salthill husband" friend. This closely knit society explodes and then comes back together in new configurations as each middle aged person has his or her crisis. This book could have been played for high drama, but the comedic mode suits it beautifully. Whatever she's writing, comedy or intense drama, Joyce Carol Oates has a physician's eye and the chops to bring it home. Even in such a light book, she manages to fill the pages with terrific insights about the human condition.Here's just a tiny example. Roger Cavanaugh is doing pro bono work for a legal foundation, an innocence project (one of Adam's causes) interviewing a lazy public defender who had failed to properly defend a now death-row inmate: "By degrees, Spires caved in. You could see he was a man who enjoyed caving in, at his own pace..." "Spires spoke in a childish whine. Roger could see that through his adult life, 'Boomer' had escaped punishment by pleading incompetence. He'd made a racket out of humility..." His sexual escapades are always awful, interrupted or lacking in some way. "It wasn't that he was in love with Naomi... but he felt that she should be in love with him." What precision. Not one of her big serious books but a great 'entertainment.' Would have given it 4.5 but no half stars.

A young woman tumbles into a nightmare of decadent desire and corrupted innocence in a superb novella of suspense from National Book Award–winner Joyce Carol Oates. Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp pornography, hero-worship and sexual debasement, totems and taboos mix and mutate into a startling, suspenseful tale of how a sunny New England college campus descends into a lurid nightmare. "A small gem.... Oates does not disappoint, nor does she waste a word."—The Washington Post Book World Oates often takes on sensational subject matter ... yet rarely has she done so with the churningly quiet understatement of ... Beasts."—Los Angeles Times "A cunning fusion of Gothic romance and psychological horror story, and one of her best recent books."—Kirkus Reviews "Oates's new novel is a slim one, but it packs a serious punch."—Associated Press "Delicious ... Beasts is something of a jeu d'esprit noir.... The novella length is exactly right for it."—The New York Review of Books

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prominent writers of her generation, and she is fearless when exploring the most disturbing corners of human nature. In Evil Eye, Oates offers four chilling tales of love gone horribly wrong, showing the lengths people will go to find love, keep it, and sometimes end it.In "Evil Eye," we meet Mariana, the young 4th wife of a prominent intellectual. When her husband's brazen first wife visits one night, Mariana learns a terrible secret that threatens her marriage and sanity. In "So Near, Anytime, Always," shy teenager Lizbeth meets Desmond, a charming boy who offers this introverted girl the first sparks of young romance. Yet just as their relationship begins to blossom, Lizbeth realizes that beneath Desmond's perfect façade lies a dark soul that could wreak havoc on Lizbeth and her loved ones. In "The Execution," spoiled college student Bart Hansen has planned the perfect, brutal crime to get back at his parents for their years of condescension. Yet what he didn't plan for is a mother whose love is more resilent than he could have ever imagined, who threatens to derail his carefully laid-out plans.

From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of ten mesmerizing stories that maps the eerie darkness within us all.Insightful, disturbing, imaginative, and breathtaking in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates’s magnificent ability to make visceral the terror, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.In “Mastiff,” a woman and a man are joined in an erotic bond forged out of terror and gratitude. “Sex with Camel” explores how a sixteen-year-old boy realizes the depth of his love for his grandmother—and how vulnerable those feelings make him. Fearful that that her husband is “disappearing” from their life, a woman becomes obsessed with keeping him in her sight in “The Disappearing.” “A Book of Martyrs” reveals how the end of a pregnancy brings with it the end of a relationship. And in the title story, the elderly Robert Frost is visited by an interviewer, an unsettling young woman, who seems to know a good deal more about his life than she should.A piercing and evocative collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep reveals an artist at the height of her creative power.

Teena Maguire should not have tried to shortcut her way home that Fourth of July. Not after midnight, not through Rocky Point Park. Not the way she was dressed in a tank top, denim cutoffs, and high-heeled sandals. Not with her twelve-year-old daughter Bethie. Not with packs of local guys running loose on hormones, rage, and alcohol. A victim of gang rape, left for dead in the park boathouse, the once vivacious Teena can now only regret that she has survived. At a relentlessly compelling pace punctuated by lonely cries in the night and the whisper of terror in the afternoon, Joyce Carol Oates unfolds the story of Teena and Bethie, their assailants, and their unexpected, silent champion, a man who knows the meaning of justice. And love.

For ten years, the charmingly disheveled veteran FBI Special Agent E.L. Pender has been investigating the apparently random disappearances of a dozen women across the country. The only detail the cases have in common is the strawberry blond color of the victims' hair, and the presence of a mystery man with whom they were last seen.Then, in Monterey, California, a routine traffic stop erupts into a scene of horrific violence. The local police are stunned by a disemboweled strawberry blond victim and an ingenious killer with multiple alternating personalities. Pender is convinced he has found his man, but before he can prove it, the suspect stages a cunning jailbreak and abducts his court-appointed psychiatrist, Irene Cogan.In a house on a secluded ridge in Oregon, Irene must navigate through the minefield of her captor's various egos -- male and female, brilliant and naive, murderous and passive -- all of whom are dominated by Max, a seductive killer who views her as both his prisoner and his salvation. Irene knows that to survive she must play along with Max's game of sexual perversion. Only then will she be able to strip back the layers to discover a chilling story of a shattered young boy -- and all the girls he adored.A sexually charged thriller of extraordinary originality and page-turning suspense, The Girls He Adored moves furiously from the inner recesses of the psyche to its final, startling climax. Jonathan Nasaw brilliantly portrays two equally intense characters -- a deviant killer and the expert who can unlock his darkest secrets -- and introduces one of the most likable sleuths in recent fiction.

I HATED this book! It was excellently written and it did what it was supposed to do...it scared the crap out of me. This is a character study of a social deviant. I don't want to spoil this for anyone who reads it, so I won't give away the ending, but definitely not something you read while lying on the beach catching your tan. No escapism here. You come face to face with the evil and cunning of the sociopathic and psychotic mind. Be prepared to bathe in Dettol and then curl up in bed under the covers next to your favorite stuffed animal with your thumb in your mouth, your night light on and your mommy on the phone 'til you go to sleep when you finish reading it. Kudos to Joyce Carol Oates for what I consider a brave, realistic creepy and excellently executed foray into the criminal mind. But I still HATED it...in a good way.

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