![]() ![]() The collection, with its emphasis on the grotesque (in her afterword, the author dryly defines Oates gleefully entwines the horrific and the homespun, more often than not eliciting goose bumps and a nervous laugh from her reader. ![]() Still, the shoppers forge ahead, picking through rotting vegetables, spoiled milk and toxic turkeys for their holiday meal ingredients. Rust-colored drops of water fell from the girders, You could look up into the interior of the roof, at the exposed girders. Overhead, part of the ceiling was missing, too. "The next aisle was darkened and partly blocked by loosely strung twine. that is clearly suffering a mysterious brand of disaster: ![]() This episode came to mind after I read "Thanksgiving," a short story from Joyce Carol Oates's latest collection, "Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque," in which a similarly blinkered father and daughter do some desperate holiday grocery They seemed intent on giving a whole new meaning to the words "fire sale." If they couldn't complete their purchases right now, would we place their books on hold until the fire was over? Why not go ahead with the transaction, since the conflagration didn't appear all that serious ![]() We locked up the cash drawers, ready to run with them into the street.īut our customers were persistent. It grew especially thick around the cash registers. Black smoke poured out of the air-conditioning FebruUnpleasant Dreams By MICHAEL UPCHURCHĮARS ago, when I was a bookstore clerk in midtown Manhattan, a fire broke out in our building. ![]()
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