Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong
Written by Joyce Carol Oates
Narrated by Luci Christian, Chris Patton and Donna Postel
4/5
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About this audiobook
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She 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.
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Reviews for Evil Eye
62 ratings8 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ms. Oates is an absolute master of the form. She has such a flawless way of creating character, depth, and realism in such a short number of pages. Although told in wildly different voices, these stories all share a sense of growing dread. The author takes time to explore the different aspects of love and how such a seemingly positive emotion can be turned to great darkness.Evil Eye - A young woman is aggressively wooed by one of her professors following the loss of her father. They are married within the year despite a 30 year age gap. She is the fourth wife. Very soon, she realizes that he is an emotionally abusive man with a temper. There is no room in his life for her, she is relegated to an annoying piece of furniture in his well appointed home. When his first wife comes for a visit, she is confided in. The first wife explains that he is an evil man and she must fight him. She must never have children with him. He is a pedophile who abused the woman's daughter. The first wife leaves in the night shortly after cutting herself in the bathroom. The young woman is alone again.So Near | Anytime | Always - A lonely high school student finds that she has attracted the attention of an older boy. Desmond is odd. He's verbose, overly mature, and a little bit condescending. But he pays attention, listens, and seems to find the protagonist very interesting. Desmond also believes in reincarnation. He believes in the afterlife. Eventually, he becomes controlling and even more strange. After they break up, he begins stalking her and eventually tries to force her into a car. She refuses and later she learns that he perished in an accident. Apparently, he was a murderer of his younger sister. He had been in a mental hospital for awhile and was chronically unbalanced. The Execution - A peevish college student decides that the only way he's going to be free of his parents is to murder them. With an axe. Mostly his mom is okay to him, but she doesn't defend him enough from his dad's constant nagging. He does a pretty good job if it, unfortunately, his mom survives the attack. However, she seems to have forgotten his involvement and swears up and down at the trial that it wasn't him. In the end he gets off, but they didn't get as much money from the dad's investments as expected. And now he's stuck taking care of his disabled mother.The Flatbed - A woman who was repeatedly sexually abused by her grandfather has a recovered memory of her trauma during a pelvic exam. When she tells her current lover about it, he becomes obsessed with exacting vengeance on the old man. The plot together to lure him somewhere isolated and murder him.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5As the sub-title says, these are four novellas of love gone wrong. The first novella, “Evil Eye”, focuses on a nazar, which is a talisman used to ward off the evil eye. Mariana is a shy, timid young woman who is the newly wedded fourth wife of Austin Mohr. Austin is 25 years old than Mariana and his adoration of her seems to be wearing off and his impatience growing. He announces that his first wife, Ines, will be coming to visit. Austin and Ines have a terrible secret that Ines wishes to confide to Mariana. Can their marriage survive this revelation? The second novella, “So Near Anytime Always”, involves another shy young woman, Lizbeth, this one a teenager who falls for a new young man in the area, Desmond. But Desmond has a dark side that Lizbeth isn’t at first aware of. In “The Execution”, college student Bert Hansen has taken too many wrong turns during his life. He blames his father for never being supportive and now his mother also seems to have given up on him. Bert plots his evil revenge on both his hated father and his loving mother. The last novella is “The Flatbed”. Cecilia has never been able to have a normal sexual relationship due to the abuse she sustained as a child. The new man in her life thinks revenge will give the help that Cecilia needs to overcome her issues.Joyce Carol Oates has long been a favorite author of mine. She’s an expert at pulling her readers in right at the start of her stories and then gradually leading them up to the point where you start to realize that something is horribly wrong. She would have been such a wonderful writer for the old TV series, “The Twilight Zone”. I had chills through all four of these tales and highly recommend them.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I've never been a huge fan of short story anthologies, so I approached this work by one of my authors with some hesitation. Oates delivered in a big way. I wouldn't put "Evil Eye" in the same category as "Black Water" or even "Zombie," but this creepy collection of tales that chronicle twisted relationships kept my interest from start to finish. As always, Oates' narratives are riveting and dominated (pun intended) by memorable characters.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I picked this up in a hurry and was oh so glad I did. A small collection of Neat, Tidy and Quirky stories, which I never paused at any time to guess where the stories were going. Now having finished them they urge me on to read more of her other books; all of which seem to be further collections of short stories but hopefully there'll be a novel or two tucked away somewhere.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5After reading Daddy Love and its endless repetition I can not believe that I was stupid enough to read another Oates book. If you enjoy reading the same story four times you might enjoy this group of four novellas. I do not know what men have done to Ms. Oates in her life but in every one of these stories the plot centers around a sick abusive man who damages an innocent naive woman. Daddy Love, of course, is about a pedophile. These are the only two Oates books that I have read but if this is characteristic of her beliefs I feel that a therapist is in order.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The individual stories were well written, but "The Execution" was read a little too forcefully (each short story had a different narrator) and spoiled the, otherwise, promising piece. Overall, these were brilliantly composed and read with perfected interpretation.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Wow. Joyce doesn't fail to deliver on these four gems. NOT for the faint at heart, the stories do become progressively harsh, I found myself reading more slowly as the I went from story to story. I repeat - not for the faint at heart, I won't be passing this one along because I don't want to be held responsible.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An excellent collection of short stories that really pulled on me emotionally! I would give this 5 stars, but I didn't think the first three stories "paid off" for me. I loved how they built in suspense and drama, but the ends left me wanting. The fourth story, "The Flatbed" was wonderful, and I would have behaved exactly as N. did! Interesting to me is that two of these stories have a female character missing an eye - or do they? Read this book!