Neon, night : tales of mystery and suspense / Joyce Carol Oates.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A new collection of dark, chilling tales from the #1 New York Times Bestselling author.

From literary icon Joyce Carol Oates comes a brand new collection of haunting and, at times, darkly humorous mystery & suspense stories. These are tales of psyches pushed to their limits by the expectations of everyday life--from a woman who gets lost on her drive home to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's ideals of beauty and womanhood.

Taken as a whole, the collection forms a poignant tapestry of regular people searching for their place in a social hierarchy, often with devastating and disastrous results. Rendered with stylish, fresh writing from an author who continues to push the envelope, the stories deftly weave in and out of a stream-of-consciousness to reflect the ways we process traumatic experiences and impart that uncertainty and uneasiness to the reader.

Originally appearing in publications as disparate as Harper's, Vice, and Conjunctions, the stories comprising Night, Neon showcase Oates' mastery of the suspense story--and her relentless use of the form to conduct unapologetically honest explorations of American identity.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• Detour (p. 1)
• Curious (p. 31)
• Miss Golden Dreams 1949 (p. 75)
• Wanting (p. 89)
• Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino, CA (p. 139)
• Intimacy (p. 149)
• The Flagellant (p. 175)
• Vaping: A User's Manual (p. 193)
• Night, Neon (p. 217)
• Acknowledgments (p. 299)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Abuse, madness, confinement, and flight are prominent themes in this strong collection of nine varied, dark, and disquieting stories from Oates (Night, Sleep, Death, the Stars). Masterly executed stream-of-consciousness prose bolsters unpredictable, haunting tales like the impressive "Detour," in which a woman's ill-chosen route home leads her to a nightmarish alternate reality. In the equally unusual "Miss Golden Dreams 1949," the narrator is an expensively priced cloned collector's piece from the 1940s. Other highlights include the ingeniously crafted "Curious," which details an infatuated novelist's attempt to improve a grocery store clerk's unhappy situation, and the tense yet delightfully comic "Intimacy," in which a pitiable university professor is confronted by an aggressively unhinged student, who's resentful of the criticism his teacher and classmates have bestowed on his ghastly, deliberately upsetting fiction. Not every selection may be top-notch, but the erudite, inventive Oates is always worth reading. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc. (June)

Kirkus Book Review

The latest collection from the indefatigable Oates reprints a recent novella along with eight shorter nightmares. Nightmares is an even more apt term than usual for these stories, whose meanings are developed not by well-made plots but through flashbacks, reflections, or complications of their powerful opening tableaux. "Night, Neon," the longest tale, supplements its presentation of a heroine who's just learned that she's pregnant with a systematic account of her relationships with abusive men that makes this news a decidedly mixed blessing. In "Curious," an unrepentantly intellectual novelist who's asked "Where do you get your ideas?" recounts his obsession with a supermarket checkout girl. "Miss Golden Dreams 1949" is spoken in the spectral voice of a Marilyn Monroe clone offered for sale. The relationship the heroine of "Wanting" strikes up with an artist reaches a dead end that reveals that "wanting has doomed her." "Parole Hearing, California Institution for Women, Chino Ca" provides a litany of more or less self-contradictory reasons why a member of the Manson family should be paroled on her 15th try. "Intimacy" shows a professor's relationship with a menacing student becoming increasingly fraught without becoming increasingly well specified. The title character of "The Flagellant" constantly punishes himself for an unspeakable crime for which he cannot express remorse to his jailers. The caretaker of an ailing mother spirals out of control in "Vaping: A User's Manual." And in "Detour," the story that seems to be the exception to the anti-plot rule, a woman forced to take a detour two miles from her home slips the traces of her humdrum life and sinks into a hallucinatory alternate reality that shakes her to the core before releasing her. A perfect recipe for nine sleepless nights. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.