"A haunting new collection of eerie, mysterious, and chilling tales from one of America's greatest writers. These new, recent, and reconsidered stories by Joyce Carol Oates, collected here for the first time, showcase a wide range of crime fiction and psychological suspense, highlighting the celebrated author's macabre talents. In the title story, an insecure young woman grows increasingly dependent on a man who likes to take her on long walks beside a dangerously roaring creek. In another tale, a man is so forgetful that his wife panics, fearing that he has lost their infant daughter. Unspoken horrors are suspected beneath the appearance of marital bliss. A careerist is driven mad by professional jealousy. A passing romantic fling takes a perilous turn. Each story is a "compact gem of unease" (Publishers Weekly) and each charts its own unpredictable path into darkness. The result is an unsettling collection that could only spring from the mind of Joyce Carol Oates, an author whose provacative formal experimentations continually yield surprising and intriguing results." -- Provided by dustjacket.