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 three decades as a writer, are among her most unsettling and unforgettable works to date. Originally published in long out-of-print volumes, these tales have not appeared in any form this century --- until now.

Sand. A hostile world of burning sun. Outlines of several once-busy cities shimmer on the horizon. Now empty of inhabitants, their buildings lie in ruins. In the distance, a group of people --- a family --- walks toward us. To survive in this alien world of shifting sand, they must find an object hidden in or near water. But other families want it too. And they are willing to fight to the death to make it theirs. It is beginning to rain in Fairfax County, Virginia, when McKenzie Strathie wakes up. An ordinary teenage girl living an ordinary life --- except that the previous night she found a sand-lizard in her bed, and now she's beginning to question everything around her, especially who she really is.

When John Frankel’s ex-wife is discovered dead on the floor of his Manhattan studio apartment, the NYPD detective instantly becomes the prime suspect in her murder. Then more information surfaces, linking his gun to the fatal bullet, a motive is discovered and Frankel flees the city, all of which further convinces his colleagues of his guilt. In spite of the mounting evidence, Frankel’s bride-to-be, Rachel Grant, and her father, Austin Grant, formerly of Scotland Yard, are certain of his innocence. But with the police under orders to use whatever force necessary to stop what they view as a dangerous criminal, the duo will have to act fast before the manhunt goes violently wrong.

As a girl, Joanna Chase thrived on Rustling Willows Ranch in Montana until tragedy upended her life. Now 34 and living in Santa Fe, she begins to receive pleas: I am in a dark place, Jojo. Please come and help me. Heeding the disturbing appeals, Joanna is compelled to return to Montana, and to a strange childhood companion she had long forgotten. People from all walks of life have converged at the remote Montana ranch. They are haunted, on the run, obsessed and seeking answers to the same omniscient danger Joanna came to confront. All the while, on the outskirts of Rustling Willows, a madman lurks with a vision to save the future. Mass murder is the only way to see his frightening manifesto come to pass.

At first, Logan Ramsay isn’t sure if anything's different. He just feels a little…sharper. Better able to concentrate. Better at multitasking. Reading a bit faster, memorizing better, needing less sleep. But before long, he can’t deny it: Something’s happening to his brain. To his body. He’s starting to see the world, and those around him --- even those he loves most --- in whole new ways. The truth is, Logan’s genome has been hacked. And there’s a reason he’s been targeted for this upgrade. A reason that goes back decades to the darkest part of his past, and a horrific family legacy. Worse still, what’s happening to him is just the first step in a much larger plan, one that will inflict the same changes on humanity at large --- at a terrifying cost.

Lucy Harper still has traumatic memories and lingering health problems from the 2020 pandemic. So, when a new virus surfaces years later, she and her husband, Reed, seek refuge on his family’s private island off the coast of Maine. Ostensibly safely sequestered with their five closest friends and family, Lucy should feel at ease. So why does she feel the weight of the island’s dark history pushing down on the group? As Lucy uncovers Reed’s family secrets and the island’s history as a quarantine hospital for typhus patients, she becomes obsessed with the past and feels her own grip on reality slipping. Tempers flare, strange signs appear in the woods, and accidents turn deadly. Is the island haunted by the dead? Or is someone amongst the living taking their revenge?

TV writer Yara Gibson is back in her hometown of Palmdale, California, to host her parents’ 20th anniversary party. Everything is going according to plan until she receives a disturbing text: I have information that will change your life. The message is from Felicia Campbell, who claims to be a childhood friend of Yara’s mother and insists on talking to Yara “before it’s too late.” But the next day is already too late for Felicia, whose body is found floating in Lake Palmdale. Before she died, Felicia left Yara a key to a remote lakeside cabin. In the basement are files related to a mysterious tragedy, unsolved since 1998. What secrets was Felicia hiding? How much of what Yara knows about her family has been true?

Every day without fail, Travis Devine puts on a cheap suit, grabs his faux-leather briefcase, and boards the 6:20 commuter train to Manhattan, where he works as an entry-level analyst at the city's most prestigious investment firm. Then one morning, Devine's tedious routine is shattered by an anonymous email: She is dead. Sara Ewes, Devine's coworker and former girlfriend, has been found hanging in a storage room of his office building, prompting the NYPD to come calling on him. If that wasn't enough, before the day is out, Devine receives another ominous visit, a confrontation that threatens to dredge up grim secrets from his past in the army unless he participates in a clandestine investigation into his firm.

In the winter of 1969, the bodies of four young women were discovered in a cemetery near the tip of Cape Cod. In a place once known as Helltown, the victims had been shot, stabbed, dismembered and mutilated. As investigators would soon learn, the perpetrator was a young, handsome serial killer named Tony Costa. A bizarre former taxidermist with a split personality and a penchant for violence, Costa ultimately mobilized friends in the hippie community for support and retribution, and captivated literary icons and rivals Kurt Vonnegut and Norman Mailer. Costa embarked on a daring cat-and-mouse game with investigators, who --- as the body count kept growing --- were desperate to put an end to the killing season on Cape Cod.

Art Barbara was a 17-year-old high school loner in the late 1980s who started an extracurricular club for volunteer pallbearers at poorly attended funerals. His new friend brought along her Polaroid camera to take pictures of the corpses. Okay, that part was a little weird. So was her obsessive knowledge of a notorious bit of New England folklore that involved digging up the dead. And there were other strange things --- terrifying things --- that happened when she was around, usually at night. Decades later, Art tries to make sense of it all by writing The Pallbearers Club: A Memoir. But somehow this friend got her hands on the manuscript and, well, she has some issues with it. And now she’s making cuts.