In The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates is in her comfort zone, applying her literary mastery to the horror genre. The first story is about a lonely boy--unloved by his father, neglected by his mother--who develops the habit of collecting dolls that he finds on the street. By the time readers find out what he's been doing with the dolls, it's too late to hate him. In another, a teenager is alone housesitting an isolated mansion when a familiar, but slightly altered, person from her past shows up. In the longest story of the collection, while a woman wonders if her husband has planned her murder on their vacation in the Galapagos Islands, her own sanity slips away.
When Oates refers to terror in the title, she's not just talking about the bump-in-the-night kind. Of course, that kind of fear is present in these chilling stories, but there's a much more visceral version of anxiety buried in each one. While this collection seems to be an experiment in all the types of horror storytelling--there's the story with a shocking twist, there's a monster in one, a murder in another--what ties them together is the skin-crawling psychological aspect of each. What remains unforgettable after reading is just how realistic even the most evil of her characters are. It is vintage Joyce Carol Oates to remind us that every one of us is capable of being both victim and perpetrator of some really dark stuff. --Josh Potter