Spotlight on “Flint Kill Creek” by Joyce Carol Oates

by LitStack Editor

Flint Kill Creek is a new collection of stories of mystery and suspense by Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s greatest writers.

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LitStackers! Get ready to add another title to your “TBR” list! Flint Kill Creek: Stories of Mystery and Suspense by Joyce Carol Oates is generating serious buzz. This collection of stories of mystery and suspense from W.W. Norton & Company has early readers buzzing. We’ve sneaked in through W.W. Norton’s basement to show you what’s on the book cover, from the publisher’s official description to the early reviews that suggest this book is one you want to order today. Here we go!

Flint Kill Creek by Joyce Carol Oates

About Flint Kill Creek

These new, recent, and reformulated stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense. 

  • A young, insecure woman finds her relationship changing as she grows more and more dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. 
  • Another woman, nervous around men, not quite knowing how to act when paid a compliment, becomes flustered when a doctor suggests they go out for coffee, or possibly a drink. She finally decides that she will join him when he suggests they meet at his home. 
  • A man is so forgetful that his wife panics and yells into his phone, asking where their daughter has gone. 
  • A young man is curious to see why sirens have filled the night and the police arrest him, beginning an unimaginable nightmare. 
  • A woman resents that a colleague has achieved greater success and thinks she ought to do something about it.

It is impossible to know where a story by the creative genius of Joyce Carol Oates will end and what frightening paths will lead to that end.

A master of the short story. For decades, Oates has been one of the most prolific authors of short crime fiction, with stories consistently nominated for awards and finding placement in annual “best of” anthologies.

Praise for Flint Kill Creek

“Grimly satisfying . . . Oates’s prose is surgically precise, and her appetite for the grotesque falls on the right side of lurid. [Flint Kill Creek] This will thrill the author’s fans.”Publishers Weekly

“There are no happy endings . . . yet, in thrall to a master manipulator of words, readers will grit their teeth and turn another page in this collection. The stories in Flint Kill Creek are unforgettable.”NY Journal of Books

“[The stories in Flint Kill Creek] from the reigning monarch of neo-gothic creepy-crawlies [are] fever dreams for readers with a taste for freak shows that just might be about them.”Kirkus

“Joyce Carol Oates is one of today’s finest writers. Her latest release, Flint Kill Creek, is . . . written in her indomitable style that has made her a legend, and even in the short story form, her keen eye and way with words are evident. . . . Flint Kill Creek features some fine storytelling as only someone with Joyce Carol Oates’ pedigree can produce.”BookReporter

“In this collection of twelve stories [in Flint Kill Creek], in which relationships swerve disastrously off course, people aren’t as one thought they were, and seemingly bucolic landscapes turn sinister, Oates carefully threads strands of mystery and evil through the quotidian.”New Yorker

“If you like your fiction noirish and nerve-shredding, look no further than the latest offering [Flint Kill Creek]  from US literary powerhouse Joyce Carol Oates.”BBC

About Joyce Carol Oates, Author of Flint Kill Creek

Flint Kill Creek author Joyce Carol Oates
2014 Larry D. Moore Licensed under CC BY 4.0

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates 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.

You can connect with Joyce Carol Oates on Facebook, on Substack, and read more about her on Wikipedia.

Source: Publisher
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9781613167168
Pub Date: July 1, 2025

Other LitStack Resources

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Flint Kill Creek
Flint Kill Creek
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Flint Kill Creek
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Flint Kill Creek

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