The Museum of Dr. Moses reviewed: Spooooooky!
Author’s Note: I want to encourage my readers to go to http://www.epinions.com/content_432280931972 if they have an opinion about this review and rate it there. I’d like comments both here on the blog and at epinions.com
The Museum of Dr. Moses
This volume of short stories by the extraordinarily gifted Joyce Carol Oates is subtitled “Tales of Mystery and Suspense.†The subtitle is wrong. None of the ten stories in the collection is a tale of mystery and/or suspense. With a single exception, “The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza,†they are tales of the macabre. “LaStarza†is a non-genre story about a boxer’s demise.
Oates has a genuine talent for creating macabre tales that are compulsively readable and stick in the mind afterward. One of the excellent stories in this book is “Suicide Watch.†It takes place in the visiting room of a prison in which a father visits an adult son and may – or may not – learn the hideous truth about what has happened to the grandson.
Oates is an expert at planting seeds and wickedly playing with a reader’s expectations. “Valentine, July Heat Wave†appears to be a very macabre story at the beginning and then turns into something else that manages the feat of becoming even more deeply macabre. It is also one of those stories that tickles the imagination due to the possible unreliability of its disturbed narrator.
“Feral†is another story that changes track. It begins as the story of a mother whose child suffers because of the mother’s moment of distraction and then turns into a tale of eerie surrealism.
“Bad Habits†is one of the more sensitive stories, albeit frequently unflinching in its depiction of utter grossness. It tells the story of a serial murderer from an unusual viewpoint: that of his children. Oates draws us into their painful and desperate attempts to understand their father and his crimes.
“The Twins: A Mystery†is, like the book itself, badly mis-titled. It is not a mystery although it has mysterious elements. It is an interesting horror tale with a toehold in the science fiction genre.
Perhaps the single failure of the collection is “Stripped.†Only three pages, it does not work as a story but could function as part of a longer work.
“The Museum of Dr. Moses†is the last tale in the collection. Other reviewers have, in my opinion, made a serious mistake of interpretation in accepting the story at face value. They appear to assume a trustworthy narrator. However, Oates puts in suggestions of hysteria and paranoia in the narrator whose overactive imagination and inability to differentiate between nightmare and truth could lead to tragedy.
One problem with these stories, and with much of Oates’s more recent work, is a tendency toward repetition that does not underline important points but merely slows the action down as well as a tendency toward too much description. Both “â€LaStarza†and “Dr. Moses†are longer than they should be for maximum impact. Nevertheless, the collection, however misleading its subtitle, is a worthwhile one, especially for fans of psychological horror.
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