Late Love by Joyce Carol Oates, 2024
The magic trick:
Building a truly macabre mood out of the mundane details of domestic life
“Late Love” is the story of a woman disturbed by her husband’s nightmares. He mumbles in his sleep and looks altogether different (and perhaps more evil) than she ever imagined him.
Its slow pace and attention to every possible detail of the woman’s insecurity and frustrations is positively Maeve Brennan-esque.
But don’t worry, it soon pivots into a suitably Oates-ian state of macabre.
The nightmares get increasingly more intense, or rather, their effect on the woman’s thoughts gets increasingly more ghoulish. There is a transition into a scene involving leeches (I won’t spoil it beyond this brief mention) that is truly an exceptional bit of writing and will have your skin crawling.
And that’s quite a trick on Oates’s part.
The selection:
Gently, the wife touched the husband’s shoulder. Gently, she tried to wake him, not wanting to alarm him. “Darling? You’re having a bad dream.”
With a shudder, the husband threw off the wife’s hand. He did not awaken but seemed to burrow deeper into the dream, as if held captive by an invisible, inaudible adversary; he did not want to be rescued. The wife was fascinated, though alarmed, by the way the husband had worked himself up into a fever state—the T-shirt and shorts he wore in lieu of pajamas were soaked through, and his body thrummed with an air of frantic heat, like a radiator into which steaming-hot water has rushed unimpeded. Fascinated, too, by the husband’s sleep-muffled words, which were almost intelligible. Like words in a foreign language that so closely resembles English you are led to think that meaning will emerge at any moment.
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