"Thanksgiving" by Joyce Carol Oates, as reprinted in her collection Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (Dutton 1994) and newly offered in her Substack blog, "Joyce Carol Oates: A Writer's Journal" (the story can be read here).
A bit of dystopian near-future fiction for us all in this holiday, given the promise of the dystopian near future shaping up in the nation; a young woman and her father go foraging for what they can find in the remains of the local A&P (already an anachronism, as even the diminished SuperFresh chain version of the former A&P supermarket giant is now long gone...I might miss their not-bad sugarless cream soda, reasonably priced, the most), in a rural area not altogether unlike the one in New York where Oates grew up, only with everyone feeling more acutely the straitened circumstances of some sort of postwar It's Run Down chaos.
So, a fine way to celebrate the holiday, and a good story. As someone who's published about Oates, and coincidentally written this kind of story for Patricia Abbott and Steve Weddle's anthology Discount Noir, it's worth the look if you're feeling up for it for this particular season.
Please see Patti Abbott's blog for more of this week's short fiction.
3 comments:
A brilliant story. Thanks for sharing.
Not at all, Patti...thanks to you, in this thanking season.
Ellen Datlow's THE BEST HORROR OF THE YEAR: V. 16 has coincidentally been made available today: https://www.skyhorsepublishing.com/9781949102734/the-best-horror-of-the-year-volume-sixteen/
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