The 1990's have seen Joyce Carol Oates cultivating the novella form with exquisitely lyrical tales of young women variously confronting, succumbing to, or transcending harrowing psychic and physical violence. I Lock My Door Upon Myself (1990), The Rise of Life On Earth (1991), and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Black Water (1992) are among Oates's best, most incisive works, though they have been overlooked relative to her longer fiction (Black Water being the exception—one must wonder if it would have received such deserved attention had not its plot so closely resembled the Kennedy-Kopechne tragedy at Chappaquiddick.) With First Love: A Gothic Tale, Oates has written another sparkling, dark gem to set beside her earlier novellas, but one which, published only five months after a major short story collection, and two months before a major novel, may be overlooked as well. This would be an unfortunate fate for such a beautifully wrought story.

Josie S___ is an eleven-year-old girl who has come to live, with her mother, at her great-aunt Burkhardt's brooding house near the Cassadaga River. Also staying there is twenty-five-year-old Jared, Jr., a distant cousin of Josie's and a Presbyterian seminary student on leave for the summer. Josie is drawn to her stern and mysterious cousin, accidentally/deliberately meeting him down by the river where she is seduced and ceremonially molested in a baptism of blood and dirty river-water. Delia, Josie's mother, is too involved in her own illicit activities—or so we assume, anyway: this is one of many family secrets kept from both Josie and the reader—to pay attention to Josie's distress. Delia dismisses, with ironic prescience, Josie's innocent questions about past "bad blood" between the families: "`One day,' Mother said ominously, yet with satisfaction, `you'll know.'" In fact Josie knows now all too well the kinds of events that lie behind unspoken family secrets. Josie is terrified by her cousin, but mesmerized by him as well, enduring further molestations, and eventually becoming a kind of acolyte, assisting him with his disturbed, "religious" sacrificial ceremonies.

The story is told from the perspective of an adult Josie looking back on these events, but her narrative voice is broken into two distinct strains: one realistic, and one Gothic. The realistic voice narrates in the first person and tells most of the story; it is when Josie is enthralled by Jared, Jr., however, that her Gothic voice narrates, in the second person, suggesting that she must distance such shattering experiences in this way to be able to speak of them. Oates has written that "the imaginative construction of a `Gothic' novel involves the systematic transposition of realistic psychological and emotional experiences into `Gothic' elements." So in her Gothic voice, Josie frequently observes her cousin as an actual black snake, a creature both repulsive and seductive. Telling her mother, before the first molestation, that she is afraid of the "black snake" she saw down by the river, Josie must endure her mother's ridicule of her fear: "to take yourself so seriously, at your age . . . an eleven-year-old scarcely exists." In fact it is Josie's existence, her identity, her very soul which is at stake in this Gothic tale. Exploring the Burkhardt library, Josie is bewildered by the images of Jesus Christ in myriad guises on the wall: "I looked from one Jesus Christ to the other, turning on my heel in growing alarm, for which was the Son of God?" Josie is looking for the one authentic Jesus, but finds only others' interpretations of Him. Just so does Josie allow her own self to be defined by others, first by her mother, and then by Jared, Jr., who shows her photographs of naked and tortured girls, photographs in which Josie truly believes she sees her own face. During a final "test" which would seal her degradation, Josie, in an act of betrayal and defiance ("fear will save your life" Jared, Jr. ironically tells her), breaks her cousin's spell, and finds her own authentic self.

Joyce Carol Oates is not known for writing happy endings, and she does not provide one here, but it is surprising, in light of her reputed "dark vision," how many of her works do have positive endings, how many of her insulted and injured characters, like Josie, transcend their wrenching experiences. "Our past may weigh heavily upon us," Oates writes in an afterword to her Gothic masterpiece, Bellefleur, "but it cannot contain us, let alone shape our future." Illustrated with Barry Moser's elegant and nightmarish woodcuts, First Love: A Gothic Tale is a beautifully written and symbolically rich story that shouldn't be missed.