Night, Neon and Other Stories of Suspense

These are tales of psyches pushed to their limits by the expectations of everyday life - from a woman who gets lost on her drive back to her plush suburban home and ends up breaking into a stranger's house, to a first-person account of a cloned 1940s magazine pinup girl being sold at auction and embodying America's ideals of beauty and womanhood.

Taken as a whole, the collection forms a poignant tapestry of regular people searching for their place in a social hierarchy, often with devastating and disastrous results. The stories comprising Night, Neon showcase Oates' mastery of the suspense story and her relentless use of the form to conduct unapologetically honest explorations of American identity.