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    Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
    Unavailable
    Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
    Unavailable
    Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
    Ebook306 pages5 hours

    Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense

    By Joyce Carol Oates

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    The National Book Award winning author of Blonde demonstrates her mastery of contemporary gothic horror in these 10 chilling short stories.

    The need for love—obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable—can take us to forbidden places, as Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates with fearsome clarity in this short story collection. In “Strip Poker,” a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men. In the award-winning “Smother!” a young woman’s nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble on her professor-mother. In “The First Husband,” a jealous man discovers that his wife seems to have lied about her first marriage—and waits years before exacting a cruel revenge.

    In these and other powerful tales, children veer beyond their parents’ control, wives and husbands wake up to find that they hardly know each other, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and those who bring us the most harm may be the nearest at hand.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJan 7, 2011
    ISBN9780547504636
    Unavailable
    Give Me Your Heart: Tales of Mystery and Suspense
    Author

    Joyce Carol Oates

    Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

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    Reviews for Give Me Your Heart

    3.5/5

    34 ratings6 reviews

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    • 3/5
      A strange and dark set of stories. Some better than others, all somewhat ambiguous.
    • 4/5
      This collection of short stories is more than a little disturbing, all the more so since they take place in everyday life and not some dark, shadowy forest or a deserted haunted house.Oates tells most of the stories in the first person, several from the neurotic viewpoints of the "perpetrators." Most of the main characters are female and several teen girls are in precarious situations with older men. The main themes throughout the collection are love/lust, seeking love, trying to keep love, and the crimes people commit in the name of love/lust.I wouldn't call the stories mysteries (the reader knows who does what), but they are suspenseful. I wanted to know how each ended. However, Oates did not provide closure. Most of the stories either just stopped or fizzled out with no clear conclusion.
    • 4/5
      I’ve gone back and forth on my feelings about the books of Joyce Carol Oates…and after reading “The Falls”…I settled on the idea that while I tend to really dislike the characters in her novels – I really like her short stories. I love the feeling of having NO idea what will happen in a story…but feeling positive that whatever it is, will be more than just this side of creepy.“Give Me Your Heart”, and in particular, the title story, gave me that thrill of fear. That sense that even though I was reading the story outside on a sunny day…that there was a decent chance I’d turn around and see a flash of an image that belonged in a horror movie. That the setting was happy and good, but not so far below the surface lurked murky darkness and more than a dash of ill-controlled madness.“Your wife’s death was spoken of as a “tragedy” in certain circles, but I preferred to think of it as purely an accident: a conjunction of time, place, opportunity. What is accident but a precision of timing?”These stories give the reader the most unreliable of narrators…except that maybe they are more reliable in a way. While what they think or feel seems completely divorced from reality – we do have the authenticity of fevered emotions, of blinding obsessions…we see behind the façade of normalcy that these characters may present to the world. We may not see the actual truth – but we see their truth.“Wanting badly to escape now, push past his mother and run upstairs to his room, shut the damn door behind him and burrow into his most secret and forbidden thoughts, sick thoughts, guilty thoughts, where neither his mother nor his father could follow him. For there are places in the world like secret fissures and fault lines into which we can burrow, and hide, where no one can follow.”All of these short stories stand alone…but when read in the order presented in this book…the quicksand under the reader’s feet slips away faster and faster. Less seems certain, the shadows lengthen and the tingling sensation between one’s shoulder blades gets stronger with each new character we meet.“He was talking to himself now, whispering and laughing. Why was he laughing? Something seemed to be funny. Spittle shone at the boy’s red fleshy lips, and the nostrils of his broad stubby nose were edged with bloody mucus.”There are stories in “Give Me Your Heart” that delighted the darkest parts of my imagination. I hope never to meet these characters in real life, especially in a dark alley, but I’ll remember my glimpse into their twisted thoughts for some time.
    • 4/5
      Thanks Ms. Oates, for another crazy-arse ride through the severely disturbed psyches of the Common Man. Though these are called Tales of Mystery and Suspense, they might more appropriately be called Tales of the Sick and Twisted Mind. Don’t get me wrong, they are riveting, perfect to a letter in conveying, in staccato bursts, how the mind devolves into the ultimate social mayhem of murder and other destructive behaviours. The piece de resistance being the feelings of compassion that linger towards these sad characters as they are drawn inexorably into darkness. Some tales give you the relief of the near miss, others the dreaded finality of crossing the line, and all of them cause you to turn the pages ever quicker with ever more trepidation of what is lurking around the corner in each protagonist’s mind. These tales include the Iraq war vet, the adolescent girl, the disturbed child, the disturbed mother, someone for everyone.MAT03/22/11

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Joyce Carol Oates is never bad, but when an author is as prolific as she is, they can't all be gems. I look forward to her gothic work with real relish, so I might have set my expectations a little high for this one. Unfortunately, it doesn't compare to her excellent Collector of Hearts or Haunted. These stories are more like novellas, and while they are dramatic and interesting in their own right, I would call them mostly drama of one kind or another--not mystery and suspense. It simply didn't hold my interest--possibly because these stories weren't what I was looking for or expecting.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      I've been trying to figure out the best way to break into Joyce Carol Oates – that is, what would be the best novel, what would be the best writing, what would be the best experience to determine if I would enjoy what she has to offer. When I came across this collection of stories, I figured it represented as good an approach as any.And so after reading, I can strongly say that I am, well, I am still searching. That is, the collection was good. All well written with some images that have stuck with me. For Example, the story "Strip Poker" was uncomfortable and one I didn't necessarily enjoy, but the images and the power of the story still sit with me. Similarly, the story "Smother" – more enjoyable – and concepts and images that still, vaguely, haunt. (I have given no synopses to these stories. By the nature of the collection ["tales of mystery and suspense], these are stories that a synopsis will either spoil or do absolutely no justice.)On the one hand, these were stories that were interesting enough for me to want to explore more of Oates' work. But not blindingly impacting me to the point where I am begging more. But that all comes off much more downbeat than this collection deserves. It is good. As I've indicated there are images and concepts and writing that, when I look through the collection, come back to me with fullness. It is a collection worth reading. I just wonder if I expected more (such a long search to try and determine what to read) and that build up led to this minor let down.And, to be honest, I feel I am going to have to come back to this collection again – reread because I think there is much more here than I have given credit for.

      1 person found this helpful