High Crime Area

January 13, 2014
Oates (Evil Eye) offers unexpected glimmers of redemption amid the grotesquerie, degradation, and exploitation that fill this collection’s eight tales. The volume picks up momentum after the predictable and slow-paced opener, “The Home at Craigmillnar,” as Oates delves into denser, more complex realms in the subsequent entries. Several stories—notably, “High” and the novella-length “The Rescuer”—deal with privileged white women who (perhaps) naively force themselves from their sheltered academic world into situations fraught with economic, racial, sexual, and social tensions. Monstrosity, apathy, and despair plague family relationships in “The Rescuer,” “Demon,” and “Toad-Baby.” Many of the characters’ most intimate connections are with strangers, or with the potential those strangers have to indelibly alter the narrators’ lives for better or worse. Oates is at her best depicting characters who seem perplexed by their own needs, desires, and obligations, and readers seeking tidy resolutions and clear endings won’t find them in these tales. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins and Assoc.

July 28, 2014
Each of the six performers chosen to narrate Oates’s collection of dark character studies suits the atmosphere of malaise and despair that emerges from the author’s odd, elegant prose. Ray Chase starts the collection by portraying an orderly at a facility for the elderly in “The Home at Craigmillnar,” with a dispassionate voice as the character describes the discovery of the body of an aged, unloved nun. Chris Patton provides a tense, anxious history of the child in “Demon,” who has suffered most of his young life, while Tamara Marston employs a plaintive yearning in “Lorelei,” in which the title character searches for a touch of humanity in the subways of New York. Donna Pastel uses a dry and mildly distracted approach for “High,” in which a middle-aged widow tries to cope with the loss of her husband, first with marijuana, then by courting danger. Whelan shifts from determined to dreamy in “The Rescuer,” as the promising grad student who travels to Trenton, N.J., to save her brother from a druggy vortex, only to find herself slipping in. Finally, reader Luci Christian finds the perfect hardboiled teenager voice for the 13-year-old narrator of “Toad-Baby,” a grim, not-quite-nuclear family tale that, surprisingly for Oates, ends with more than a hint of hope. A Mysterious hardcover.