Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories

This will not be my favorite JCO collection, but it's an interesting one nonetheless. The loose theme in this collection, as noted on the book, is one of menace or threat. While the title story deals with an obvious menace, a killer, most of the stories are about more subtle or internal threats. A young teen is taken to identify a body to determine whether it is her mother. A young man, sitting among graduates waiting to collect his diploma, contemplates revealing himself to his notable biological father, who is there on stage to receive an honorary degree (and has no clue that the son exists). A woman is called into her daughter's school because there seems to be evidence that her daughter is being abused by someone (this is told from show more the mother's viewpoint). A woman thinks she is seeing a spotted hyena or a man with fur lurking around her house. The taut strings under the surface of a marriage are plucked during a trip to Rome...

Oates succeeds in making us feel that sense of menace on one end or the other. We are often inside the narrator's head for these stories, along with their fears, both real and imagined. She's brilliant at that stuff. show less

I picked up this collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates because of the title story, which is about the Hollywood murder of Betty Short, known as the Black Dahlia. Here, Short and Marilyn Monroe are roomates and aspiring starlets. Monroe is still innocent and holding to her principles, working hard at acting class and playing by the rules, such as they are. Short has been in town longer, is a lot less starry-eyed and more willing to take chances. Which didn't work out well for her.

The rest of the stories are astonishingly diverse. Usually, a collection of stories by a single author can feel repetitive, as stories repeat themes and word choices. JCO doesn't do this at all. The following story, I.D., is told from the point of show more view of a teenage girl pulled out out of her Atlantic City middle school by the police. Other stories deal with an English class in a prison, an Italian vacation, a meeting with a high school guidance counselor and a graduate school drop-out reconnecting with a TA who had helped her. Some are told in first person, others in third, but always from a close proximity to the protagonist, who changes dramatically in each story. The women are all insecure and several have Daddy issues, but all in very different ways.

There is a sense of unease running through each story or, at least, I spent much of each story waiting for something horrible to happen. Especially when things seemed to be going fine, or when the protagonist felt hope for the future. I don't think these stories are intended to make the reader feel comforted or secure. show less

I have been reading Joyce Carol Oates for decades and I still do not know how she does it. Now in her mid-seventies, Oates is producing some of the best, and darkest, fiction of her career – and she does it at a pace that would shame most writers half her age. The quality and impact of her latest short story collection, Black Dahlia & White Rose, makes me believe that Ms. Oates will continue to write memorable fiction for a long time to come. Thankfully.

Black Dahlia & White Rose is a collection of eleven short stories recently published in magazines such as Playboy, Harper’s, and Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. The book, comprised of four separate theme-related sections, opens with its tone-setting title story. The story is based show more on the infamous 1947 Los Angeles murder-mutilation of Elizabeth Short (who was dubbed the “Black Dahlia”) that, to this day, remains unsolved. It is especially striking because Oates allows the victim to speak retrospectively from beyond the grave and portrays her as having been the lone roommate of aspiring starlet Marilyn Monroe at the time of her murder.

Believe it or not, the stories get even darker from there. Oates uses the remaining ten to expose the hidden inner lives of ordinary human beings simply trying to make their way from one day to the next without getting into any more trouble than they are in already. Her characters, be they academics or befuddled middle-school students, San Quentin lifers or innocent young children, wives trapped in doomed marriages or abandoned husbands wondering what happened, all have something in common: they are miserable and they are looking for a way out. But, because the choices they make often place these troubled souls into more precarious circumstances than the ones they yearn to escape, their moves usually just make things worse

A poor college student learns the hard way that returning a found wallet does not always work out well for “The Good Samaritan.” A respected college professor finds out how unprepared she is to do voluntary teaching inside the walls of a maximum-security prison. A young middle-school student faces a life-changing trauma no child should ever be asked to confront alone. A woman contacts a man to whom she was attracted when she was one of his graduate students – almost twenty years earlier. These are just some of the sinister stories readers will experience in this collection.

Black Dahlia & White Rose is a collection via which the author reminds us again that we are all more vulnerable to evil and sudden loss than we dare admit to ourselves. With approximately twenty short story collections already under her belt, Joyce Carol Oates has already accomplished more than most writers would dare dream of accomplishing in an entire career.

And that is just her short fiction.

Rated at: 4.0 show less

Black Dahlia & White Rose by Joyce Carol Oates is a collection of short stories based on the darker side of the human experience. As she explores the darker side of life, the author manages to give voice to a variety of characters. Many are victims that show us how darkness can overtake the most ordinary of lives.

The author’s focus is usually upon women or female children and she develops the tension that gives the reader the idea that something bad is going to happen with the consequences to be revealed at a later time.

Black Dahlia & White Rose consists of 11 short stories and, of course, some are better than others but overall this is a worthy collection. The author excels in adding the right amount of ambiguity to keep us guessing show more as she treads the line between depressing the reader or making the reader think. I am a fan. show less

I seem to have a love/hate relationship with the writings of this author. There are instances when after reading one of her books, I swear never to read another, and then find one I haven't read and bring it home.

Exceedingly dark, this is a set of short stories, each different, but alike it the typical noir of her writing style. The title is taken from the first story of Elizabeth Short, aka The murdered woman known as The Black Dahlia. The unsolved mystery remains to haunt. I'm not sure if Elizabeth was a room mate of Marilyn Monroe, but in this story the two beauties share an apartment while trying to make a mark in Hollywood. One is grossly butchered, the other goes on to ever-lasting fame.

Some of the remaining stories are ok, but show more not as strong as the first. Overall, unless you are an avid fan of Joyce Carol Oates, I can't recommend this one. But there certainly is something about her style that keeps me coming back for more. show less

What a joy this reading was. There are snappy, surprising short stories that show the classic human sides. Each story shows other abysses that are self-contained and can not be compared. Each story grabbed me from the first set and was exciting until the end.
This book I highly recommend.

This is a collection of short stories. The author is prolific and has written better books than this one. She might be considered a modern day Edgar Allan Poe. Some of the stories are more interesting than others. Some are odd in than apparently the character changes from human to animal without any explanation (one story from woman to bird and in another from woman to spotted hyena). The story called Anniversary has an apparent conflicting ending. Joyce is well researched as evidenced by the stories of Black Dahlia and White Rose and that of Spotted Hyenas: A Romance. Joyce likes to deal with stories of sexual frustration and broken relationships. I liked the story entitled Good Samaritan for the interesting ending.