John Freeman

No living American writer echoes the chord of dread plucked by Edgar Allen Poe quite like Joyce Carol Oates.

There is something rotten, possibly even evil pulsing away beneath the floorboards of her short fiction. In her latest collection, "The Museum of Dr. Moses," she dares her readers to pry up the hardwood and find out what it is. In all but a few cases, readers are likely to do so—and be rewarded with gripping tales. Here are ten stories with nifty trick endings, foreshadowed within an inch of their life. Nothing here is what it at first appears—something her taut, police-report prose signals in the first sentence.

"Good-looking, husky guy, six-four, in late twenties or early thirties," starts off "Hi! Howya Doin!" "He’s hurtling along the moist wood-chip path at the western edge of the university at 6PM." Even if Oates hadn’t signaled this description comes from a police report, a reader would have to be pretty dim not to suss out that something very bad will happen to this jogger.

Like a few other pieces in this book, "Hi Howya Doin!" is not so much a story as a long-prose poem, which works language to a froth and then ends with a bang, relieving the reader of the tension caused by Oates’ constant circling back to the known details of the jogger’s description. "Stripping" describes someone showering off what at first sounds like grime, but quickly becomes evidence of a murder. In "Valentine, July Heat Wave," a man writes a valentine that turns out to be numerating the reasons why his wife murdered him.

Not all of the work comes off perfectly. "Bad Habits," a story about children of a homicide, never differentiates its characters enough for a reader to care about their fate. "Suicide Watch," the tale of a father visiting his son in a psyche ward, loses momentum when it becomes clear the son isn’t as ill as he seems.

But "The Museum of Dr. Moses" recovers from these stumbles right away. Like a musician gently turning up the volume on a single note until the listener has a hard time imagining it not there, Oates is a master of suspense.

"The Museum of Dr. Moses"

By Joyce Carol Oates

Harcourt, $24, 229 pages

(2007-08-21)

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