Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque

Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque is a collection of 16 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published in 1994 by E. P. Dutton. The volume includes an afterword by Oates.

Stories
• PART I

• ”Haunted”

• ”The Doll”

• “The Bingo Master”

• “The White Cat”

• PART II

• ”The Model”

• PART III

• ”Extenuating Circumstances”

• ”Don’t You Trust Me?”

• ”The Guilty Party”

• ”The Premonition”

• ”Phase Change”

• PART IV

• ”Poor Bibi”

• ”Thanksgiving”

• ”Blind”

• ”The Radio Astronomer”

• ”Accused Inhabitants of the House of Bly”

• ”Martyrdom”

Reception
Literary critic Michael Upchurch in The New York Times describes the narratives in this collection as “grotesque,” containing perhaps “the most gruesome passage Ms. Oates has ever written, offering ample ammunition to anyone wanting to call her on her fascination with all things violent and degrading.” In the Afterword, the author herself terms the volume "the very antithesis of 'nice.' " Comparing some of the stories unfavorably to Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale" and Doris Lessing's "Fifth Child” Upchurch regards a number of the tales as “variously intriguing but slight.”

Noting that the stories in Haunted “seem to move from the horrible to the grotesque,” Los Angeles Times literary critic Susan Salter Reynolds writes they “lack heart.” She adds: “It doesn’t mean they aren’t entertaining or ‘well-written.’ They’re just a little slick.”

Critical Assessment
The stories in Haunted are written in the tradition of Gothic literature with a   postmodernist orientation. Literary critic Greg Johnson observes that these “ ‘tales’ are integral to Oates’s larger endeavor in fiction, which is to probe relentlessly the complex mysteries of human personality and identity.”

In “Accused Inhabitants of the House of Bly,” Oates pays tribute to novelist Henry James, revisiting his The Turn of the Screw (1898), told from the perspective of the manor’s former and now deceased governess, Miss Jessel. However, critic Michael Upchurch chastens Oates' approach for “making explicit everything that is ambiguous in the Henry James novella. Ms. Oates's delicious ambiguity elsewhere in ‘Haunted,’ notably in ‘The Premonition,’ makes one wish she had tried a subtler approach when tampering with a masterpiece.”