Flint Kill Creek

Stories of Mystery and Suspense

22 November 2024

Territory Rights — Worldwide including Canada, but excluding the British Commonwealth.

Description

A BBC and New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2024

A new collection of stories by one of America’s greatest writers

These new, recent, and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. A young, insecure woman finds her relationship changing as she grows more and more dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. Another woman, nervous around men, not quite knowing how to act when paid a compliment, becomes flustered when a doctor suggests they go out for coffee, or possibly a drink. She finally decides that she will join him when he suggests they meet at his home. A man is so forgetful that his wife panics and yells into his phone, asking where their daughter has gone. A young man is curious to see why sirens have filled the night and the police arrest him, beginning an unimaginable nightmare. A woman resents that a colleague has achieved greater success and thinks she ought to do something about it.

It is impossible to know where a story by the creative genius of Joyce Carol Oates will end and what frightening paths will lead to that end.

Reviews

"Grimly satisfying . . . Oates’s prose is surgically precise, and her appetite for the grotesque falls on the right side of lurid. This will thrill the author’s fans." — Publishers Weekly

"There are no happy endings . . . yet, in thrall to a master manipulator of words, readers will grit their teeth and turn another page in this collection. The stories in Flint Kill Creek are unforgettable." — NY Journal of Books

"[These stories] from the reigning monarch of neo-gothic creepy-crawlies [are] fever dreams for readers with a taste for freak shows that just might be about them." — Kirkus

"Joyce Carol Oates is one of today’s finest writers. Her latest release, Flint Kill Creek, is . . . written in her indomitable style that has made her a legend, and even in the short story form, her keen eye and way with words are evident. . . . Flint Kill Creek features some fine storytelling as only someone with Joyce Carol Oates’ pedigree can produce." — BookReporter

"In this collection of twelve stories, in which relationships swerve disastrously off course, people aren’t as one thought they were, and seemingly bucolic landscapes turn sinister, Oates carefully threads strands of mystery and evil through the quotidian." — New Yorker

"If you like your fiction noirish and nerve-shredding, look no further than the latest offering from US literary powerhouse Joyce Carol Oates." — BBC

Hardback

9781613165577

160 x 236 mm • 288 pages

£16.99

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Standalone Ebook

9781613165645

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