The Frenzy: Stories by Joyce Carol Oates [Book Review]

Joyce Carol Oates has a talent for finding the exact moment an ordinary day starts to go very, very wrong. The Frenzy: Stories is dark, unsettling, and full of people making the kinds of choices you desperately wish you could stop.

Rating: 3.75 out of 5 stars

Joyce Carol Oates has never seemed particularly interested in making anyone comfortable, and I mean that as a compliment.

She writes about people at their worst, their weakest, their strangest, and sometimes their most frightening. Not because she wants to shock us for the sake of it, but because she seems endlessly fascinated by what people are capable of.

That is very much the territory of The Frenzy: Stories.

This collection is full of bad decisions, unsettling encounters, grief, violence, desire, jealousy, fear, and people realizing, usually too late, that whatever happens next is going to change their lives.

Ordinary Life, Right Up Until It Isn’t

The short stories begin in recognizable places and situations. A romantic weekend in Cape May, NJ. A bike ride. A hike through the woods. A family relationship shaped by jealousy. A widow waiting in her riverside home.

And then something shifts.

Sometimes it happens suddenly. Sometimes you can feel it coming and wish, uselessly, that the character would make a different choice.

That tension is where Oates is especially good.

Joyce Carol Oates Is Very Good at Making People Uncomfortable

One of the things I continue to love about Oates is that she has no interest in filling her stories with easily categorized “good” or “decent” people.

She writes about humanity.

The good, yes, but also the selfish, cruel, frightened, obsessive, reckless, delusional, and terrible parts.

That is what makes her work so addictive to me.

Her characters frequently make choices I hate. Sometimes I don’t even like them very much. But I want to understand them, which is far more interesting than simply rooting for them.

In The Frenzy, Oates is especially sharp when she turns uncertainty into suspense. She can take a passing doubt or an uneasy interaction and tighten it until the whole story feels dangerous.

There were several moments when nothing explicitly terrible had happened yet, but I was already tense because Oates had made it clear that something was off.

When the Darkness Starts to Blur Together

As much as I enjoyed the collection, I did feel its weight by the end.

There is a lot of violence, distress, psychological instability, grief, and threat here. Individually, many of those stories work beautifully. Taken together, the effect can become repetitive.

A handful of stories also lean so heavily into escalation and shock that they lose some of the nuance that makes the strongest pieces so effective.

There is also an intentional emotional distance to several of these characters. That works thematically, but it sometimes kept me from becoming fully invested in their fates.

I was intrigued more often than I was moved.

The Part I Keep Coming Back To

What connects these stories most successfully is the idea that catastrophe is not always some massive, unknowable event waiting in the distance.

Sometimes it’s a decision or a person you meet.

Sometimes it is a moment when you could intervene and don’t; or one small turn in the wrong direction.

Oates keeps returning to that thin boundary between a normal day and the point of no return, and she is especially interested in what desire, grief, fear, and unequal power do to people once they cross it.

Should You Read The Frenzy?

Yes, especially if you already appreciate Joyce Carol Oates and the darker psychological territory she tends to explore.

This is not a comforting collection, and I would not recommend reading it when you are looking for something light before bed. Unless your preferred bedtime mood is “quietly suspicious of everyone,” in which case, congratulations, you have found your book.

When Oates is at her best in The Frenzy, she is doing exactly what makes her fiction so compelling.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for an advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.