The National Book Award winning author of Blonde demonstrates her mastery of contemporary gothic horror in these 10 chilling short stories.

The need for love—obsessive, self-destructive, unpredictable—can take us to forbidden places, as Joyce Carol Oates demonstrates with fearsome clarity in this short story collection. In "Strip Poker," a reckless adolescent girl must find a way of turning the tables on a gathering of increasingly threatening young men. In the award-winning "Smother!" a young woman's nightmare memory of childhood brings trouble on her professor-mother. In "The First Husband," a jealous man discovers that his wife seems to have lied about her first marriage—and waits years before exacting a cruel revenge.

In these and other powerful tales, children veer beyond their parents' control, wives and husbands wake up to find that they hardly know each other, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and those who bring us the most harm may be the nearest at hand.