THE DEEP ONES: "Family" by Joyce Carol Oates

"Family" by Joyce Carol Oates

Discussion begins May 27.

First published in the December 1989 issue of Omni magazine.

ONLINE VERSIONS



BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?64043

SELECTED PRINTED VERSIONS

The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories
American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now
Masters of Darkness III
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection

MISCELLANY

http://www.usfca.edu/jco/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Carol_Oates
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1996/oct/31/the-king-of-weird/
http://www.darkecho.com/darkecho/horroronline/oates.html
http://www.usfca.edu/jco/americangothictales/
http://tinyurl.com/mnjckdy

I choose...American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now.

While I may have this in the archives in the original Omni, I'll be reading this out of The Weird.

For the first time this season, I read a Deep Ones tale in... an Actual Print Book (American Fantastic Tales)!

>1 semdetenebre:

That piece from The New York Review of Books that you linked to (Oates writing on H.P. Lovecraft) is excellent.

I may have read this in the original Omni, but I don't recognise the cover or any of the stories. I'll look online for something but guessing I'll bow this one out.

Read it last night in American Fantastic Tales.

>7 paradoxosalpha:

Same here.

>5 artturnerjr:

I know! Especially coming from Oates in 1996!

I'm not surprised that "The Colour Out of Space" seems to be her favorite of HPL's stories.

Just joined the group. I'll be reading this in American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from the 1940s to Now.

Welcome, Ross!

>8 semdetenebre:

I know! Especially coming from Oates in 1996!

Exactly. This is before Penguin Classics' and Library of America's HPL volumes came out, so it was a big deal for a Legitimate Literary Writer like JCO to come out with such a laudatory piece on Grandpa.

>10 Ross_T._Byers:

Welcome to the WT, Ross!

>10 Ross_T._Byers:

Welcome to the Weird, Ross!

What a nightmarish story, chock full of gothic awfulness! Incest, insanity, sickness and disease, murder... The It's Alive-style baby is horrifying enough and makes for a gruesomely effective monster creeping out from hellish Freudian depths, but even worse is the psychopathology of the disintegrating family. Make that an entire disintegrating society, post-whatever happened, since there are hints that the family seems to be merely status-quo instead of some kind of freakish, aberrant clan. The idea of Ma and Pa being instantly replaced and forgotten is divorce culture taken to an extreme. Every kid's nightmare. The baby's fate in the barrel reminded me a bit of a similar scenario in Thomas Tryon's The Other. Just a lot sicker!

I didn't get much weird from this one, although it was gothic as could be, and certainly horrific.

My - what a grotesque and disturbing tale! I liked the frisson created by the tension between Oates' long, lyrical sentences and the macabre events depicted by them. The mysterious nature of the apocalyptic events that precede the story (a comeuppance of sorts for American military adventurism, perhaps?) is also effective and appropriate, especially considering that a child is the point of view character (after a cataclysm, kids don't know wtf is going on).

Favorite line:

"What I like best," she whispered "is the black waves that splash over us, at night."

Brrr.

>15 paradoxosalpha:

The family itself reminded me a bit of HPL's backwoods clans. The Whateleys came to mind a couple of times. Perhaps Oates has provided a post-Old Ones scenario without any god-monsters in attendance.

Straub chose it for American Fantastic Tales, but the only "fantastic" element I could see was the contra-factual or projected demise of the larger society. That makes it ok for Omni as "science fiction" I guess, but not so much "supernatural horror."

I can definitely see the HPL influence -- "The Colour Out of Space" particularly.

>16 artturnerjr:

Yes - JCO's understated authorial voice has so much power behind it. The horrifying bits are matter-of-fact and emerge suddenly and with a lot of... bite!

>17 semdetenebre:

The rats are an HPL trope, too.

>18 paradoxosalpha:

Straub chose it for American Fantastic Tales, but the only "fantastic" element I could see was the contra-factual or projected demise of the larger society. That makes it ok for Omni as "science fiction" I guess, but not so much "supernatural horror."

Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" (also in that collection) is like that, too. Good story? Yeah, definitely. Does it really belong in a book called AMERICAN FANTASTIC TALES? Well...

I thought of "The Colour Out of Space" too, but also The Little House on the Prairie, (or a distorted image thereof), J. G. Ballard (those abandoned planned communities), and a section in the novel Lavondyss which is set in Ice-Age Britain, in which Robert Holdstock imagines what it might take to survive in such hostile conditions. It involved incest across two generations, a fertile female being more important than anything else to the survival of - well, if not the species then certainly of that isolated family group. There's also murder and, if I remember right, cannibalism.

Edited to add: didn't investigation of mitochondrial DNA indicate something very like that happened in the distant history of people of Northern European ancestry?

>16 artturnerjr: Yeah, I got the suspicion this might be Joyce's satire on the Reagan presidency -- all those National Guardsmen about and the worsening lot of the poor.

>22 housefulofpaper: I believe in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn he mentions DNA evidence that everybody's ancestors went cannibal in the past.
I hadn't thought of Ballard but the increasing social decline is reminiscent of him.

I thought there was an element of mass devolution in the Family. They're starting to lose track of language. "Family" becomes more a social or ecological signifier than a genetic description.

The end line about the Year 1 evokes the French Revolution and the Khmer Rouge, but, here it's not a statement of hope and expectation. It seems more an acknowledgement that, at least in the Southern Gothic-like, shabby rural aristocratic family, things have been reset.

I did think the story stumbled a bit when Oates tried her hand at a Lovecraft style naïve narrator. Specifically, when the narrator talks about how it almost seems like Father's (the first one) statement had been "clumsily cut and spliced", but she emotionally doesn't sound like she truly believes this -- though I think she should.

>23 RandyStafford:

Yeah, I got the suspicion this might be Joyce's satire on the Reagan presidency -- all those National Guardsmen about and the worsening lot of the poor.

Oates' story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" was rather famously inspired by Bob Dylan's "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". Perhaps, in a similar fashion, this tale was inspired by Dead Kennedys' "We've Got a Bigger Problem Now":

https://youtu.be/wngUsiLnL7k

>24 artturnerjr: Thanks, Art. It's been awhile I've partaken of the Dead Kennedys.

>25 RandyStafford:

My pleasure. Just a dab'll do ya. 8)