This collection of short storis examines the capacity of women to do evil. Bringing us into the depths of horror, Oates's protagonists range in age, interest, and situation. We meet a six-year-old girl, a young nurse, a middle-aged fashionista, and an elderly woman dying in a nursing home, among others. What unites all of these women across their stories are the desperate personal circumstances in which they find themselves, and the realization that the only path out is a dark and disturbing one. As with much of Oates's work, this collection addresses the exploitation and marginalization of women in American society, yet it does so through horror and suspense. This is a deliciously suspenseful collection, excellent reading for a spooky October night.

I could not even read all of this.. I was very dissapointed and did not find these stories very suspenseful at all.. Thought the woman characters were mostly stupid. It does, however, have an Edgar Allen Poe style to it. If only it had the Poe imagination to match.

The violence is gratuitous. pointless, and just plain stupid. As are these stories. A women commits the capital crime of being married to an older wealthy man. In addition, she is often exasperated with the fawning and usually hypocritical "service providers" with whom she interacts. After Oates exhausts the dictionary heaping scorn on this character--over and over again until the repetition turns the reader numb--Oates has her tortured to death in the back room of a Madison Avenue boutique. Once a provocative and original writer, Oates now writes with the screechy, scolding tone of a bitter crone.

The world portrayed in Joyce Carol Oates fiction is one filled with sudden violence, violence that more times than not comes at the expense of one of her female characters. The Female of the Species, a collection of nine stories, is indeed filled with violence but this time it is not the women who need to worry. Each of the nine stories shows what can happen when a woman decides that she has had enough of a man's abuse, infidelity, desertion and the like or when she gives in to her own sexual demons.

The book is subtitled "Tales of Mystery and Suspense" and that is not a false claim. Each of the stories is cloaked in mystery but the best of the nine shine because of the way that Oates gradually brings them to such a level of suspense that the reader can hardly wait to get to the last page to find all the answers. In "Hunger," the longest of the nine stories, and my favorite, a young wife and mother who seems to have it all, including a rich, older husband who spends more time working than with his family, meets a man on the beach and crazily becomes obsessed with him. Will she come to her senses before she makes a fatal mistake? Is her oblivious husband, a good man who truly loves his wife and daughter, in danger? As the suspense built and built, I completely lost myself in what is one of the best short stories that I've ever read.

The other eight stories are a bit uneven; some of them I will remember a long time for the tragic worlds in which they placed me for a few minutes and one or two others because they just did not work for me. The best of the stories somehow made me sympathetic to the women driven to violence despite the horror of what they were doing. Those included stories about women who respond to fears for their personal safety with violence of their own and stories of children driven to desperation by their mothers. But I found "Madison at Guignol" to be a surrealistic misfire that left me both repulsed by its descriptions of torture and confused by its message. And I was disappointed that "Angel of Mercy" did not offer any new insights into what causes a nurse to kill her patients rather than to watch them suffer slow and painful deaths.

That is the danger, I suppose, in a book that contains only nine stories. The ones that don't work out for the reader remain as memorable as the ones that do.

I have been an Oates fan for 20 years or more--since I was a teenager and found my mother's copy of "Where are you Going, Where have you been?" I have always felt that the gruesome, macabre, and disturbing elements of Oates' work were unfailingly balanced by her subtle and precise renderings of complex human motives and desires. In this book, the shell of Oates is still there, but the deeper layers that had kept her stories from tumbling into sick, voyeuristic, violence-porn are glaringly absent. This book fails to explore anything deep or worthwhile and conveys only ugliness and evil. Many of the stories seem to come from some well of hatred toward women that is truly disturbing. In the past, reading Oates' stories was always worth the trip. No longer. Something has changed and not for the better. I would not advise anyone to read these stories.