Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense is a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates published in 2018 by The Mysterious Press. "The Woman in the Window" was anthologized in The Best American Mystery Stories in 2017.Barry, 2018: The Woman in the Window, selected for The Best American Mystery Stories 2017."
Stories Selected periodical and date of original publication are provided:Oates, 2018 p. 335: Acknowledgments
"The Woman in the Window" (One Story, June 9, 2016) "The Long-Legged Girl" (Kenyon Review, September/October 2017) "Sign of the Beast" Amazon Original Stories, November 28, 2017) "The Experimental Subject" (Conjunctions, Online Exclusive, Spring 2017) "Walking Wounded" (Conjunctions, Vol. 65, Fall 2015) "Night-Gaunts" (The Yale Review, October 2017)Oates, 2018 p. 335: Acknowledgments: "contains isolated lines from H. P. Lovecrafts "The Outsider" "The Shunned House" and "At the Mountains of Madness"
Reception Reviewer Michael Thomas Barry at The New York Review of Books questions the clarity and purpose of these stories:
Theme The title of the collection is derived from Gothic writer H. P. Lovecraft's autobiographical report of his disturbing childhood nightmares involving faceless monsters. Oates selected the Lovecraft poem "Night-Gaunts" for the volumes's epigraph. His work was originally published in Weird Tales, December, 1939.Oates, 2018: Epigraph opposite credit pageAnderson, 2018 p. 3: "Lovecraft wrote a poem about these creatures which Oates includes in the epigraph of her story collection which is also called Night-Gaunts."
Literary critic Eric K. Anderson regards the volume as a suitable homage to Lovecraft and Oates's literary debt to him: "In fact, the titular story which ends the book is a tribute to and a fictional re-imagining of Lovecraft's life."Anderson, 2018 p. 3
Anderson adds that the collection as a whole "skillfully invokes the tortured imagination of Lovecraft and form utterly compelling modern tales of suspense."Anderson, 2018 p. 7
Footnotes
Sources Anderson, Eric K. 2018. Review of Joyce Carol Oates's Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense. Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. Vol. 4, Article 5. LonesomeReader Blog. University of San Francisco. https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1029&context=jcostudies Accessed March 10, 2025. Barry, Michael Thomas. 2018. "Night-Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense." The New York Review of Books https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/night-gaunts Accessed 9 March 2025. Oates, Joyce Carol. 2018. Night-Gaunt and Other Tales of Suspense. The Mysterious Press, New York.