Ominous shadows of the past protruding from the darkness of the night... Fear lurking in the secret corners of the soul, coming to life again and again in bizarre nightmares. Painful, essentially Kafkaesque, paradoxes of an inflamed consciousness and mystically strange metamorphoses of seemingly ordinary ones. things...All this is in the magnificent gothic stories of Joyce Carol Oates, stylistically impeccable and at the same time shocking, frank in their naturalism, but invariably highly intellectual.