A little blood goes a long way

There's an awful lot of blood running through these stories. The first, which gives the collection its title, consists of a vengeful letter written by a woman to her much older ex-lover, an academic. Their affair, decades earlier, ended when he dumped her and she's never forgotten or forgiven him, especially his promise to give her his heart. Now she wants it, literally. She stalks him, razor blade in hand. But when he fails to show up in a museum she declares she would have killed the guard instead, "out of frustration at not finding you, out of female rage at centuries of mistreatment, exploitation "

In Split/Brain, a woman returns home to discover her violent drug-addled nephew has let himself in uninvited. She decides to confront him rather than retreat, despite knowing he might attack her. "This furious stranger who resembles her 17-year-old nephew will back off from her to leave her sprawled on the kitchen floor to suffocate in her own blood, her lungs have been punctured, her throat is filling up with blood, in something like elation he has thrown down the bloody paring knife."

Then there is the menstrual blood which courses through other stories such as Strip Poker, in which a 13-year-old girl half-deliberately arouses a group of older boys when she agrees to go on their boat, called the Hot Li'l Babe, to a remote cottage on a lake, where things threaten to turn nasty when they get drunk and want her to play strip poker.

The implications of what brutality a much younger girl has suffered are worse still in the baldly titled Bleeed [sic], in which Jess, an adolescent boy, grapples with his own sexual turmoil in a culture where parents tell their children sex is a dirty secret while at school it is "normal", "healthy" and "nothing to be ashamed of". Above all, though, he believes that "sex was that 'terrible man' who'd done that 'terrible thing' to a little girl whose name Jess would try not to remember".

Joyce Carol Oates at 72 remains one of America's most prolific writers, churning out fluent prose and poetry with enviable regularity. There's a lot of it in print and a little goes a long way.

The men never fare well in her stories, being prone to violent acts brought about by sexual desire and jealousy; but then nor do the women. I suspect that after writing these stories, Oates might have wanted to go to wash her hands, like Lady Macbeth.