![]() ![]() ![]() There's nothing of the supernatural in either story, or for that matter in any of the "tales of terror" in the present collection, but Oates's brand of horror has never required the invocation of other worlds: This world is terrible enough for her. The smooth-talking male predator in this new one, "Big Momma," keeps a very large metaphor as a house pet: the title character is a 20-foot-long reticulated python. ![]() It is, in its chillingly objective way, scarier than anything in Oates's new collection, THE DOLL-MASTER AND OTHER TALES OF TERROR (Mysterious Press, $24) - which, as it happens, contains a story about another teenage girl who gets in the wrong car. FIFTY YEARS AND MILLIONS OF WORDS AGO, when Joyce Carol Oates was in her late 20s, she wrote a story about an unhappy teenager named Connie who accepts a ride, unwisely, from a dark, glib young man who calls himself Arnold Friend, and although that story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?," is scrupulously realistic, it is also a classic tale of horror. ![]()
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