The Ruins of Contracoeur and Other Presences

Introduction by Lisa Tuttle
Cover image by Meggan Kehrli

Signed by author Joyce Carol Oates, introductionist Lisa Tuttle, and artist Meggan Kehrli.

“To be fated, to be accursed — isn’t that also to be special?”

A group of resourceful young girls punish the men of a small town for unspeakable lusts by luring them to a derelict factory and into the toils of a bizarre contraption; a dead man tries to makes sense of a strange epiphany he experienced one day when out hiking amid gigantic ancient redwoods; and a state judge, fleeing disgrace, settles with his family on an isolated ruinous estate where some dread thing prowls in the night . . .

As Lisa Tuttle notes in her introduction, where most writers, as most people, tend to “settle down” as they age, to work within ever more constrained limits, Joyce Carol Oates’s remarkable imagination, in the sixth decade of her career, manifests no sign of such complacency. The six savage, glittering stories in this volume show it has, on the contrary, become ever more transgressive and restless.

Contents

• "Introduction" by Lisa Tuttle
• "Mr. Stickum"
• The Cold"
• "Monstersister"
• "Commencement"
• "The Redwoods"
• "The Ruins of Contracoeur"
• "Sources"

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of a number of collections of tales of the “uncanny” and “macabre”. These include Night-Gaunts, Dis mem ber, The Doll-Master, and the novellas Jack of Spades and A Fair Maiden. Her work has been included in the Best Fantasy and Horror and the Best American Mysteries anthologies. She is the recipient of the Bram Stoker Award for Horror Fiction as well as the National Book Award (US) and the National Medal for the Humanities. She lives and teaches in Princeton, New Jersey.

Limited hardcover