Oates, ventriloquist of evil, channels females on the edge
The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
By Joyce Carol Oates
Harcourt, 275 pp., $24
It's a fairly safe bet that a new book by Joyce Carol Oates will provide readers a liberal dose of savagery. Mapping the journey from the commonplace to the calamitous has always been one of her central preoccupations. ''The Female of the Species" offers nine such excursions, all starring women whose lives veer inexorably toward homicide.
No doubt the most striking of her lady killers is a prepubescent prostitute named Doll (''Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi") who travels the country with her stepfather, meeting, murdering, and -- when the mood strikes -- mutilating her clients.
''Doll is holding the razor-on-the-stick just behind her right buttock along the smooth curve of her warm flesh," Oates writes. ''[She] tiptoes to the tub to where the naked man awaits her trembling in anticipation and she strikes unerringly with the razor -- one! two! three! -- in the sawing technique she has perfected, and a four! and five! for good measure with such deadly force (city homicide detectives will marvel) that the victim's head is nearly severed from his body."
Most readers will grasp what Oates is up to here -- this is Lolita recast as a revenge fantasy. Doll toys with the men who pay to meet her in dingy motel rooms, gorges on sweets, scolds her guardian for being a ''wicked ol' pre-vert," and, with a girlish giggle, presents him with trophies cut from the bodies of her victims. She is a deadly nymphet whose native cruelties have been liberated by her guardian.
What sets Oates apart from other purveyors of mayhem is her ability to inhabit the consciousness of her characters. She is, at her finest, not simply a neutral observer, but a ventriloquist of evil.
In ''The Banshee," she channels a neglected 5-year-old girl who carries her baby brother onto a rooftop during one of her mother's boring lawn parties. A sense of dread envelops the reader, as the darker impulse lurking beneath her plea for attention gradually becomes clear.
A story like this is terrifying precisely because it arises from such ordinary circumstances. Beneath the jagged, hyperventilating rhythms of the prose, one hears the seductive thrum of aggression, the roar of anticipated vindication.
''Angel of Mercy" weaves the tales of two nurses who work in the so-called City of the Damned, a ward for the brain dead. The titular character is one Agnes O'Dwyer, who takes to rescuing her charges by ''administering lethal doses of muscle relaxant, morphine. Air bubbles to the heart. The masterful use of the pillow." Her legendary killing spree plays against the quieter descent of Nurse R--, a young idealist headed down the same path.
Oates is able to capture the rich confusion of motives that drive these women. They wish to be compassionate nurses, but their devotion to lifeless patients becomes a form of unrequited love, one that curdles into malice.
The true danger here -- this applies to all our finest horror writing -- resides in those searing moments when a character comes face to face with her own destructive capacities: ''Agnes was disgusted with this pathetic being who wanted so badly to live, yet could not live. In a trance she pressed the pillow over his grimacing face. . . . Cautiously, Agnes lifted the pillow. . . . Agnes was staring at her ashen-faced victim, seeing that the face was disfigured, the nose mashed. Had she done this?"
As bracing as these stories are, Oates is occasionally susceptible to the excesses of genre writing. ''Madison at Guignol" offers us a Manhattan trophy wife who discovers a hidden dressing room at her favorite boutique and insists on gaining access, only to suffer an entirely predictable fate. Oates is clearly having fun here, but the protagonist is a caricature, and the gory culmination -- which includes genital mutilation -- feels more like authorial sadism than a genuine effort to involve the reader.
History is unlikely to deem ''The Female of the Species" a major work. It is a story collection, to begin with, and one whose subtitle will likely place it in the horror-genre ghetto. But Oates is up to something larger here. She remains one of the few major American writers devoted to exploring the untamed compulsions within us.
This feels especially vital, given current circumstances. We are a country obsessed with violence; more precisely, with watching violence. Our movies and TV shows and video games are awash in corpses. And yet we remain abstracted from actual killing, the central moral consequence of the two major wars we've launched in the past five years.
In her best stories, Oates jolts us from this numbed state. She puts the weapons in our own hands and offers us the chance to see ourselves as we truly are.
Steve Almond is the author of the story collections ''The Evil B. B. Chow" and ''My Life in Heavy Metal." 
