"The prolific" usually prefaces Joyce Carol Oates' name in reviews. She seems to be able to spew forth fiction as readily as a newspaper reporter can spew forth accounts of city council meetings and car wrecks.
Her latest is a collection of short stories. It follows her novel, "Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart," and two recent novellas, "I Lock My Door Upon Myself" and "The Rise of Life Upon Earth.""Heat and Other Stories" is composed of 25 short stories, all in the prose that flows in ripples of commas, not pretty and comforting but disquieting and frequently macabre.
The title story, along with two others in the collection, "Swimmers" and "House Hunting," are O. Henry Award winners.
"Heat" is about 11-year-old twin sisters who are murdered as told by a contemporary. It is a neat, precise account with a surreal overtone. "Swimmers" features another child voyeur who observes and wonders about and is affected by the love affair between her uncle and a mysterious woman. "House Hunting" is an unfulfilling vignette about an unhappy husband who goes house hunting alone and who wrestles with his future.
Oates runs the gamut from rural gothic to urban idiosyncratic in the stories. One of the best - my favorite - is "The Hair," a knife-sharp right-on portrait of two urban couples, how they become friends and how it ends.
"The couples fell in love but not at the same time, and not evenly," Oates writes. "There was perceived to be, from the start, an imbalance of power. The less dominant couple, the Carsons, feared social disadvantage. They feared being hopeful of a friendship that would dissolve before consummation. They feared seeming eager."
The Riegels - "a golden couple, newcomers to the area" - are the dominant couple, best friends one moment, using, neglectful and ignoring the next. The friendship ends when the Carsons visit the Riegels' weekend cottage and see the couple at their abusive, drunken worst. Even then, Charlotte Carson is careful to clean the guest bathroom before leaving, down to a tiny hair in the drain.
Among other stories in the collection, a few are worth reading only because of Oates' ability to string word pictures together.
Two were repugnant.
"The Buck" wallows too lengthily with too much sickening gore in a tale of an old woman killed by a dying buck she tries to save. "White Trash" is a stereotype of a skinny little white tramp of a girl who takes up with an old black jazz piano player.