El legado de Maude Donegal ; El hijo superviviente

In The Legacy of Maude Donegal, Clare, adopted when she was just two years old, unexpectedly receives a call to tell her that she has inherited a property on the rugged coast of Maine. The mysterious legatee turns out to be her biological paternal grandmother, whom she had never heard of before. But, very soon, what awaits Clare upon her arrival in the small town of Cardiff will make her wish she had never answered the phone... The surviving son is Stefan, who managed to save himself when his mother, a renowned poet, killed his sister before committing suicide. Years after the tragedy, when her father remarries, a new nightmare begins for the young wife: voices in the wind, a well and a blind and inexplicable magnetism towards the same place where two lives once died. .. In the two novellas included in this volume, Joyce Carol Oates, one of the great figures of contemporary American letters, pays a masterful tribute to the gothic genre with its fascinating ability to take on the most diverse literary forms and tones. Her accurate prose, which makes any word seem decisive for the outcome of the story, always leaves us with the disturbing suspicion that what is really happening is not exactly how we perceive it. And it is that intrigue and that terror that trap us hopelessly.