The Massacre at Mount Pitcairn: Stories

Four bone-chilling stories of suspense and horror from the #1 New York Times-bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates.

This new collection brings the reader into the despair and uncertainty of youth, exploring the terror of the unknown through tales of misadventure and psychological suspense.

In 1969, two young girls and their friends venture deep into the woods to explore an abandoned sanatorium. Decades earlier, a massacre took place there at the hands of the patients. Then they discover it might not be as abandoned as they thought.

A tormented boy, bullied by his family and peers, descends into hate and isolation as he fantasizes about revenge against them, until a walk home from school changes his life forever.

Having been forgotten at school pickup, a seventh-grader arrives at the home of her divorced father for a weekend stay, only to uncover a horrific secret.

A fateful cruise aboard a historic sailing ship brings terrible consequences upon an eleven-year-old and her family.

With her uncanny ability to imbue every word with dread, Oates leaves the reader second-guessing what might be real and what might be the delusions of an anguished mind.

Joyce Carol Oates is one of today’s finest writers.”
—BookReporter

Potent . . . These stories . . . thrum with all the psychological intensity Oates is known for. In each, Oates prompts readers to wonder whether her characters are seeing the world as it is or as filtered through their troubled minds. This may be slim, but it isn’t slight.”
—Publishers Weekly

Oates carefully threads strands of mystery and evil through the quotidian.”
―The New Yorker on Flint Kill Creek

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

See more titles by Joyce Carol Oates