The Female of the Species Tales of Mystery and Suspense [Paperback]

A young wife is home alone when the phone rings in “So Help Me God.” Is the strange voice flirting with her from the other end of the line her jealous husband laying a trap, or a stranger who knows entirely too much about her? In “Madison at Guignol” an unhappy fashionista discovers a secret door inside her favorite clothing store and insists the staff let her enter. But even her fevered imagination cannot anticipate the horror they have been hiding from her. In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.

With wicked insight, Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates why the females of the species—be they six-year-old girls, seemingly devoted wives, or aging mothers—are by nature more deadly than the males.

PRAISE FORTHE FEMALE OF THE SPECIES
 
Suspense fiction is like a powerful drug: one page, one taste, can induce such a tingly, speedy feeling that it takes an almost superhuman effort not to finish everything off in just one sitting. At least, that’s how it is with Joyce Carol Oates’s new collection of mystery and suspense stories . . . You can’t put this book down. —The New York Times Book Review
 
As ever, Oates shocks, delights and amuses because she's so good at what she does. —The Baltimore Sun
 
 



 

Phone rings. My cousin Andrea answers.

It's a pelting-rain weekday evening last April, just past 7 P.M. and dark as midnight.

Without so much as glancing toward me, Andrea picks up the receiver as if she's in her own home and not mine, shifting her infant daughter onto her left hip in a way that makes you think of a migrant farmwife in a classic Walker Evans photograph of the 1930s.

Phone rings! I will wish I'd snatched the receiver from l#3