Cardiff, by the Sea: Four Novellas of Suspense

Joyce Carol Oates

Oct 2020 · Grove Atlantic

About this ebook

Four brand-new novellas by the #1 New York Times-bestselling, National Book Award-winning “grand mistress of ghoulishness” (Publishers Weekly).

An academic in Pennsylvania discovers a terrifying trauma from her past after inheriting a house in Cardiff, Maine from someone she has never heard of. A pubescent girl, overcome with loneliness, befriends a feral cat that becomes her protector from the increasingly aggressive males that surround her. A brilliant but shy college sophomore is distraught to discover that she’s pregnant, and the professor who takes her under his wing may not have innocent intentions. And a woman who marries into a family shattered by tragedy finds herself haunted by her predecessor’s voice, an inexplicably befouled well, and a compulsive attraction to a garage that took two lives.

In these psychologically daring, chillingly suspenseful pieces, the author of We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde writes about women facing threats past and present, once again cementing her reputation for “great intelligence and dead-on imaginative powers” (Los Angeles Times Book Review).

Ratings and reviews

In four previously unpublished novellas, Joyce Carol Oates delivers a collection of stories that evoke a sensation of lurking threats and inevitable menace aimed toward women. Cardiff, By the Sea: Four Novellas of Suspense, a new release this Fall from Mysterious Press, contains writings composed during various phases of Oates’ long and illustrious career. All four showcase her ability to inspire creeping horror with a slow build of calculated tension. Each featured woman and girl in the novellas experience repression and abuse, until a breaking point is reached—erupting in a jolting realization, vengeance or violence. In the titular story, a young woman inherits a house from a family she has never met but finds that some pasts are better left unexplored. Her search for identity and sense of connection culminates in a realization that the cost of knowledge can sometimes be too high. The second tale, “Miao Dao” centers around a young girl whose extreme loneliness and abuse leads her to an unhealthy obsession and desire for vengeance. “Phantomwise: 1972” is about a young undergraduate whose dependence on men and longing for acceptance draw her into two relationships, both becoming predatory in their own way. The final tale, “The Surviving Child” most closely resembles a classic gothic ghost story in which a step-mother is haunted by a first wife whose murder/suicide is not as it first appears. The women Oates depicts are constantly on the cusp of crisis, filled with thwarted potential with promising futures that are cut short by the men in their orbit. She portrays an ingrained and skewed power dynamic, particularly within academia with all its insidious subtlety and outright entitlement. The collection in Cardiff, by the Sea addresses the tragic consequences that result when innocence and blind naivete are corrupted by the carelessly callous. It is another example of Joyce Carol Oates’ brilliance as a writer who can capture such complex ideas with gorgeous prose. Thanks to the author, Mysterious Press and Edelweiss for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of over seventy books encompassing novels, poetry, criticism, story collections, plays, and essays. Her novel Them won the National Book Award in Fiction in 1970. Oates has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for more than three decades and currently holds the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professorship at Princeton University.