"In twenty-two disturbing tales of crime and suspense, two hitmen in a depressed rust belt town struggle with a job gone wrong. A girl witnesses a horrifying accident and carries it with her for the rest of her life. Medical students bring a severed foot to a college party. Five-time Pulitzer Prize finalist Joyce Carol Oates has made a career of exploring the forbidden corners of human experience, and the stories collected here, spanning her first...

"In the waning days of the 1970s, the lives of several residents of Detroit and its affluent white suburbs are drawn together following the disappearance of yet another child. Hannah, a wife and mother, begins an affair with a darkly charismatic stranger; Mikey, a young street hustler, finds himself on an unexpected mission to rectify injustice; and then there's the child serial killer known as Babysitter, an enigmatic and elusive figure at the periphery...

The story of the Stevicks, an ordinary American family of the 1950s, revealing the sleeping furies that are hidden beneath the respectable surface.

"A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a man returns from the dead to haunt his grieving wife; a young mother finds herself captivated by her own motherhood. In the collection's longest story, a much-praised writer cruelly experiments with "drafts" of his...

Legs Sadovsky leads a girl gang called Foxfire during 1955 in her upstate New York hometown.

In helping two fawns find their mother in the woods, Muffin the brave cat becomes lost himself and must try to find his way home again.

Twenty-seven stories of the grotesque. The story, The Hand-puppet, is on a toy which menaces a family, in The Dream-Catcher an Indian artifact suddenly comes to life, and in The Hands, a man's hands escape his control, doing the bidding of another.

A collection of nineteen short works includes "Fire," in which a troubled wife has an affair; "Curly Red," in which a girl reveals a family secret; and "Three Girls," in which two students protect Marilyn Monroe.