In this new collection of stories Joyce Carol Oates explores the night-side of the human soul. In relating those psychological experiences in the borderland between reality and surreality, Miss Oates enters the mysterious realm of the paranormal, the world of extrasensory perception, "the other worlds of dreams and nightmares, mediums and odd happenings...." Each of us has, to a degree, a private night-side of his own, but in this collection the author, with her uniquely penetrating sense of "the other," brings the reader "through darkened landscapes on untraveled roads to solitary and unfamiliar borders" he has not journeyed before. (from inside jacket)