'As usual with Oates, it is horribly readable, but driven by something disturbingly like genuine misanthropy' Sunday Times.'Oates chillingly depicts the darkness lurking within the everyday' Daily Express.'These lured me in one by one. All were people focused, with a very strong sense of time and place and so very visual ... Groups should enjoy mulling over the way Oates so subtly drops ideas and moralities into her seemingly simple tales' Nudge Book.'A luscious smorgasbord of sinister stories whose characters are ? or end up being ? devastated, deranged or destroyed. Oates writes, with unnerving precision, about fears that lurk within each of us, and her work exposes the complexity and fragility of the human mind. The result is an anthology that is shocking, startling and unmissable' Promoting Crime.'Oates displays all her customary craft and intellect ... She is at her most macabre here' Sunday Herald.

Seven unsettling works from one of our greatest literary imaginations.

A precocious eleven-year-old, in thrall to the mysterious black sheep of the family, climbs into his sky-blue Chevy to be driven to an uncertain, unforgettable, fate.

A university student becomes obsessed with the murder of a female classmate as her own sense of self deteriorates.

A recent widow grieves inside her lakefront home and fantasizes about transforming into a great flying predator ? unerring and pitiless in the hunt.

These meticulously crafted, deeply disquieting stories confront the dangers that surround us, and the dangers that lurk within.