Heat and Other Stories

by Joyce Carol Oates

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• Heat and Other Stories(Magill Book Reviews)

• Heat and Other Stories(Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)

See Also

• Joyce Carol Oates (Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets)

• Joyce Carol Oates (Cyclopedia of World Authors, Fourth Revised Edition)

• Joyce Carol Oates (Identities & Issues in Literature)

• Joyce Carol Oates (The Sixties in America)

• Joyce Carol Oates (Critical Survey of Long Fiction, Fourth Edition)

• Joyce Carol Oates (Critical Survey of Short Fiction, Second Revised Edition)

Heat and Other Stories

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At a glance:

• First Published: 1991

• Type of Work: Short Stories

• Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction

• Subjects: 1960’s, 1970’s, Crime or criminals, Murder or homicide,Twentieth century, 1980’s, Rape, Victims, Violence, Human behavior

• Locales: United States, Canada

Although these stories scrape the surface of many politically correct themes in modern society— violence against women, midlife crisis, child abuse, and the breakup of the traditional family—they seem to spring less from the real world of experience than from the writer’s imaginative “what if.” What if a woman were attacked and stripped of her clothes while hiking one morning? What if a woman tried to save a wounded deer and it trapped her under its own dead body?

In spite of the ragged edge of sexuality and violence that seems to rip through these stories, there is a kind of prim predictability about the short fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. In the title story for example, two identical twin girls are murdered by a mentally ill young man, but the piece seems to spring from the symbolic possibilities of the situation rather than from any real mystery about the nature of violence. As is usual with Oates, these stories provide ample evidence that regardless of whether she knows a great deal about the uncanny world of demonic desire she writes about, she knows volumes about the writer’s craft; her stories derive more from the literature she has read than the life she has lived. Indeed, Oates has read so much and written so much that she may have finally have run out of storytellers to emulate, for a number of these stories give rise to each other. For example, the story “White Trash” follows inevitably upon “Death Valley,” which in turn follows hard upon “Craps”—as one situation provides the germ for the next.

Too many of these stories are aesthetically astute but emotionally cold, resonant with the influence of literature but empty of the mystery of life—in short, in spite of the book’s title, a lot of smoke, but precious little heat.