Como un espectro ; Miao Dao

In Like a Specter, the excellent student Alyce Urquhart is burdened with an unwanted pregnancy that shatters her plans for the future. Things seem to slowly get back on track for her when she finally finds support in the figure of a visiting poet from the university, who takes her under her wing and hires her as her assistant. However, the dark and not at all disinterested motives for this will soon be revealed. Bad things have been happening to Mia, the protagonist of Miao Dao, ever since she started growing up: her father abandoned them, the boys at school can't keep their hands to themselves, her mother's threatening new boyfriend just moved in. to live with them... Their only refuge is a cul-de-sac, where the neighborhood's stray cats gather. One of them, white as a ghost, will become Mia's new friend, and also her fiercest protector, as all those who torment her will soon discover. In these two steely and chilling stories, whose protagonists have to constantly deal with the threats of the past and the present, Joyce Carol Oates carries out, in addition to a brave and accurate denunciation of the subjugating power of misogyny, a superb tribute to the gothic genre.