Flint Kill Creek

A New Yorker Magazine Best Book of 2024

A new collection of stories by one of America’s greatest writers

These new, recent, and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. A young, insecure woman finds her relationship changing as she grows more and more dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. Another woman, nervous around men, not quite knowing how to act when paid a compliment, becomes flustered when a doctor suggests they go out for coffee, or possibly a drink. She finally decides that she will join him when he suggests they meet at his home. A man is so forgetful that his wife panics and yells into his phone, asking where their daughter has gone. A young man is curious to see why sirens have filled the night and the police arrest him, beginning an unimaginable nightmare. A woman resents that a colleague has achieved greater success and thinks she ought to do something about it.

It is impossible to know where a story by the creative genius of Joyce Carol Oates will end and what frightening paths will lead to that end.

Grimly satisfying . . . Oates’s prose is surgically precise, and her appetite for the grotesque falls on the right side of lurid. This will thrill the author’s fans.”
—Publishers Weekly

[These stories] from the reigning monarch of neo-gothic creepy-crawlies [are] fever dreams for readers with a taste for freak shows that just might be about them.”
—Kirkus

There are no happy endings . . . yet, in thrall to a master manipulator of words, readers will grit their teeth and turn another page in this collection. The stories in FLINT KILL CREEK are unforgettable.”
—NY Journal of Books

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

In this collection of twelve stories, in which relationships swerve disastrously off course, people aren’t as one thought they were, and seemingly bucolic landscapes turn sinister, Oates carefully threads strands of mystery and evil through the quotidian.”
—New Yorker

Joyce Carol Oates has published nearly 100 books, including 58 novels, many plays, novellas, volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, and Blonde were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize; she won the National Book Award for her novel them.

See more titles by Joyce Carol Oates