Corn Maiden

From the towering imagination of literary icon Joyce Carol Oates comes an unbearably taut tale combining folklore, adolescent insecurity and blood sacrifice, and six other, nightmarish, stories.

Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize, Joyce Carol Oates presents an unbearably taut and terrifying tale combining the fury of folklore and adolescent insecurity.

Marissa is an innocent girl, with hair the colour of corn-silk. She does not hold others in strange thrall, as some young women do, she obeys her parents, she does not stay late after school, lingering on her walk through the swaying heads of maize. She is the perfect sacrifice.

The Corn Maiden is a novella, followed by six other nightmares.

Review: PRAISE FOR JOYCE CAROL OATES:
'Oates's brand of horror has never required the invocation of other worlds: This world is terrible enough for her. Everything she writes, in whatever genre, has an air of dread, because she deals in vulnerabilities and inevitabilities, in the desperate needs that drive people [...] to their fates. A sense of helplessness is the essence of horror, and Oates conveys that feeling as well as any writer around' New York Times Book Review.
'Both haunting and sublime' Literary Review.
'An unsettling read worth every resulting jump in the night... [Oates is a] literary goddess' Daily Mail.
'As usual with Oates, it is horribly readable, but driven by something disturbingly like genuine misanthropy' Sunday Times.
'Oates chillingly depicts the darkness lurking within the everyday' Sunday Express.
'A writer of extraordinary strengths' * Guardian *