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.