A Month of Novellas, Book 22: Beasts - Joyce Carol Oates (2002)

ack! giant squirrel coming to eat us!

Beasts, a recent-ish work of Joyce Carol Oates, she of the incredulously prolific output, tricks you from the beginning.

It’s narrated by Gillian, a student at a women’s college, who is obsessed with one of her literature professors, Andre Harrow. All she can think of is him and even goes as far as to stalk his wife, a sculptor of grotesque sexual figures, around town.

All of her waking hours seem to be dedicated to analyzing the minutia of their interactions, the whole ‘he said this, could it mean that?’ nonsense that all young women (and older women too) have done throughout millennia. So at first, it all seems like this is going to be about a college girl’s crush, one that has firmly passed the infatuation stage and has landed smack dab in crazy-town. But things aren’t quite that simple and clear cut.

Gillian wonders about her fellow dorm mates, the ones that also attend Harrow’s poetry workshop. She wonders if they’re jealous of his attention to her – this attention that at first is thoroughly in her head. And then at some point he nicknames her Philomela, ostensibly because Gillian is quiet in class:

“I reread the tale of Philomela in Ovid’s Metamorphosis. I hadn’t realized how ugly it was. Philomela, a virgin, is brutally raped by a man who should’ve protected her, her brother-in-law Tereus; after he rapes her, Tereus cuts out her tongue to prevent her accusing him.
[…]
But mute Philomela is no passive victim. With the aid of her loyal sister she takes bloody revenge on her rapist. And in the end she’s metamorphosed into a bird with, as Mr. Harrow said approvingly, “blood-colored” breast feathers.
A happy ending then.
Is it?” p.46

This page tells you almost everything you need to know about what’s about to happen in this horrific psychological nightmare of a story.

Professor Harrow does end up paying more attention to Gillian (as well as her fellow class mates). Instead of writing and discussing their poetry, he has them write personal journals instead, with the deepest, darkest thoughts they have, to be shared with all in the class. For his amusement.

Meanwhile some of the girls in the class have started to drop off like flies. Sybil disappears one day and soon it’s as if she never even existed, at least not in the girls’ lives, not in the college.

And who keeps on setting all the small fires and pulling all the false fire alarms in the college?

Is Professor Harrow, or Andre as he wants his “special” pupils to call him, really interested in Gillian after all?
What’s really going on in his house after hours? And why do so many of his students keep on disappearing?

I really enjoyed my first foray into the worlds created by Ms. Oates and I look forward to reading another of her innumerable works.