Obsession with loss, fear of betrayal, and sudden violence plague the characters who inhabit these twenty-two stories in Will You Always Love Me? Joyce Carol Oates uses her talent like a scalpel to cut swiftly and precisely through the surface of everyday life to lay bare the powerful, perilous emotional currents swirling below. In the title story, a woman’s rage over the savage murder of her sister years ago crowds out all reason and hope of happiness. A respectable suburban matron becomes her son’s accomplice in sexually humiliating a glamorous new neighbor in the prize-winning “The Goose-Girl.” In all of the stories-characters, male and female, young and old, rich and poor, sophisticated and naive-come to vivid life in a world of dangerous truths and fateful consequences. Joyce Carol Oates’s uncanny eye for physical detail, her flawless ear for American speech, and her X-ray vision of the human heart and psyche make the stories she tells indelibly and inescapably real.
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It had been an accident. (ACT OF SOLITUDE)
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(@northwesternup, 1 January 1997, paperback, 336 pages, bought from @AmazonUK)
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I’ve only read JCO books once so this is my first book in my first read through. I decided to start with her short story collections as there are loads and they’re a bit easier to get into than some of her denser fiction especially since I’m also re-reading Stephen King. This is one of her earlier collections and one of her strongest. I really enjoyed Will You Always Love Me? And Other Stories. I like the fact the stories are all different in terms of genre, style and structure. I especially liked Act Of Solitude, The Goose-Girl and Christmas Night 1962. I’d recommend this.
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