JOYCE CAROL OATES

By David Bruce

Joyce Carol Oates is one of my favorite writers. Why?

I guess because I like her style. She often appears in horror story anthologies such as The Architecture of Fear, which was where I discovered her alongside other stylists of modern horror such as Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell, David Drake and Stephen King. I was surprised to see her there and thought I’d try one of her tales to see what it/she was like. She was good! I was glad she wasn’t like so many modern realists whose work is the boring, excruciatingly tedious tale of some forlorn loser aimlessly wandering through a bleak wasteland in which the only meaning he can find is in the act of nailing some other loser’s wife. Ms. Oates even won an award from The Horror Writers of America, The Stoker, for her novel Zom bie. (I was in HWA when they first began the organization and the dues were only five bucks. I argued that the award should be called The Poe, since it was The Horror Writers of America, and Stoker was British, while Poe was American, but they argued that The Mystery Writers of America already had their award, The Edgar, named for him . Then they argued that the dues should be raised to keep out the riffraff and keep in only the pros. It got too expensive for me, so I guess their plan worked.) Ms. Oates also has received a lifetime achievement award for her horror fiction in 1994 from HWA, along with numerous other awards for her work so numerous to mention that it would take over a page to list them all! A list of her many novels(38), story collections(23), poetry collections(14), non-fiction essays and literary criticism collections(9), plays and collections of plays(20), and other works where she was the editor or compiler(16) goes on for about two and a half pages in Contemporary Authors, Volume 74. She has even edited a collection of H.P. Lovecraft’s work!

I have only read a few of her short horror stories and one novel, Solstice, which, from the misleading cover illustration, I thought was going to be Joyce Carol Oates boldly writing about a torrid realationship between two lesbians, complete with blow-by-blow descriptions of their intimacies by a writer with Ms. Oates’ descriptive style and power! Imagine my disappointment, then, when after reading the entire novel, I found that the women were just friends and never even touched! One of the characters had a phobia about another woman touching her.

However, I did enjoy the few horror stories of hers that I have read. Typical of women writers of horror, she focuses more on the psychological innerworkings of her characters, and like Poe, Lovecraft, Ramsey Campbell and many other horror writers, she creates her effects with the power of her descriptive style. As we have seen, as Roger Corman so often reminded us, Poe’s effects were literary, as are Oates’, and cannot be translated effectively to the screen; hence, there are few film versions of Oates’ tales and only a few versions of Poe’s stories on the screen which are not laughably bad.

Ms. Oates even has a book about boxing in which she interviewed the then-heavyweight champion, who was surprisingly articulate for a boxer, Mike Tyson.

I definitely plan on taking a look at that work to see what Ms. Oates had to say about the "sport." One can imagine macho writers such as Hemingway or Mailer penning a tome reeking of sweat and testosterone about boxing, but Ms. Oates? The photograph of the tiny Ms. Oates standing next to the huge Tysonosaurus was certainly an incongruous one:

She a bespectacled little writer looking like a little old lady who got lost and wandered onto the stage next to Tyson, all muscle and boxing medals.

Joyce Carol Oates averages publishing two books a year. She writes realistic fiction primarily but has penned several modern Gothic novels. She is extremely prolific.

How does she manage to be a professor at the same time? Obviously this is a woman who knows how to manage her time extremely well. There seems to be no type of literature Oates hasn’t attempted and with much success and critical praise greeting each of her endeavors.

Zombie is the tale of a serial killer told from his point of view. Black Water is a thinly-disguised recreation of the notorious Chappaquidick tragedy as seen through the eyes of a victim very much like Mary Jo Kopechne. Obviously Oates takes on some very controversial subject matter. She is definitely not a boring writer. I look forward to reading her again very soon.

(Source: Contemporary Authors, Volume 74, pp. 268—281, "Joyce Carol Oates.")