Joyce Carol Oates is one of today’s finest writers. Her latest release, FLINT KILL CREEK, is a collection of new, recent and reformulated tales. They are written in her indomitable style that has made her a legend, and even in the short story form, her keen eye and way with words are evident.

Here are just a few of my favorite pieces:

“Flint Kill Creek”: The title story refers to a creek in upstate New York around the Buffalo area. This roaring stream in the Adirondack Mountains is not one in which you want to get caught up. We hear early on about Inga, who fell into the creek and washed away to her death. Oates retells the interactions between Inga and the man who walks with her and may have had a hand in her demise.

"FLINT KILL CREEK features some fine storytelling as only someone with Joyce Carol Oates’ pedigree can produce."

“The Phlebotomist”: During a routine doctor’s visit, a woman is dismayed when it takes three different employees to draw her blood. The successful one is a young man with a ponytail neatly tucked at the back of his head. As she is leaving, he is smoking a cigarette outside the building, and they strike up a conversation. The interaction turns creepy as he wants to go to her place for a drink and rattles off her address from memory.

“***”: This highly unique tale is by far the best. The narrator, who typically keeps a very detailed personal calendar of appointments, is taken aback when he looks at the date of Monday, June 11th and just sees *** marked there. He knows that it should indicate that something important is happening, but he can’t remember what it is. He also would not just put down characters like that without some name or abbreviation as a reminder.

He goes through his entire calendar and internal memory database but comes up blank. He then wonders if it indicates he should return to his childhood home in Cleveland. What happens next is a return to days of youthful innocence from one’s past that calls to mind many of the great “Twilight Zone” themes created by Rod Serling.

“The Nice Girl”: Lila Dey is always called a nice girl, and she often resents it. It’s hard not to be viewed that way in her small family, which only consists of her parents and her sister, Sabine, who constantly seems to be in trouble. Sabine has been living off campus in a seedy part of Buffalo in an attempt to finish her degree and get her life together. When she doesn’t respond to numerous calls from her parents, they gather Lila and head off to find her --- hopefully alive and not deceased from another drug-induced suicide attempt.

“Late Love”: A husband and wife, each of whom are on their second marriages, are going through some nocturnal changes that may challenge what they really know about each other. They are both widowed, and the wife has begun waking up in a panic in the middle of the night unsure of who the stranger is beside her. At the same time, the husband has been talking in his sleep and behaving in an erratic manner that begins to worry his wife and make her wonder how his previous wife actually died.

FLINT KILL CREEK features some fine storytelling as only someone with Joyce Carol Oates’ pedigree can produce. I even felt like there was a running theme through some of these tales that added an extra layer of complexity and “coolness” to them.