by Joyce Carol Oates.

Ecco. 238 pages. $24.95.

BY SAM COALE
Special to the Journal

Is there anything Joyce Carol Oates can’t do? Here are five splendid stories, imagining five major American authors on the verge of death — each rooted in biographical facts and presented in the authors’ own particular style — that are harrowing, heartfelt, incredibly moving, that cut to the depths of the psyche, probing with such laser-lean, honed prose that it’ll take your breath away.

Hemingway’s last few days are disturbingly terrifying as Oates conjures up the fatally ill, paranoid, misogynistic, doddering old Papa and pierces his consciousness with its delusions, hatreds, fears and rages. He visits his gravesite atop an isolated hill in Ketchum, Idaho. He remembers his father’s suicide, his smothering mother’s Christianity, his safari trophies, the women in his life, his measurement of male members with Scott Fitzgerald.

Oates abandons her “usual” hyper-ventilating, manic rush of words and images to meticulously capture Hemingway’s often brutal, lacerating style, nouns and verbs that can kill, as she builds her sentences as Hemingway stalked his safari prey, bristling with sexual energy and physical grace, remembering, for instance, “the shrieks of the mules at Smyrna where the Greeks broke their forelegs and dumped them into shallow water to drown.”

Henry James, tending to the war-wounded at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London in 1914-1916, is appalled at the stinks and slime and eviscerated flesh he stumbles upon. It undermines his faith in his own filigreed prose, which dwells in the stately homes of the upper classes with nary a bedpan in sight. And yet the blood and gore unleash his own repressed homoerotic longings as he begins to virtually worship several soldiers.

Sam Clemens, old and famous and knocking them dead in New York as the irreverent Mark Twain, exercises his pedophiliac yearnings by writing to 15-year-old Madelyn Avery, enticing her to secret visits in Central Park, imploring her to cuddle in his armpit. Then she turns 16, and he ruthlessly abandons her. Oates captures the many layers of his querulous personality in her Twain-inflected, colloquial prose.

Edgar Allan Poe ends up alone with a dog in a lighthouse off the coast of Chili. He prides himself on his superior abilities to withstand and enjoy the solitude, but slowly his tale, inhabited by strange sea creatures and corrosive fantasies, mimics his own fiction with its gothic, breathless style as he descends into madness.

The sci-fi tale in which the Krims buy a robot, programmed to act and speak like Emily Dickinson, an “EDickinsonRepliLuxe,” is fanciful as the “it” becomes a “her,” and Madelyn Krim bonds with it/her against her husband, but I’m not a sci-fi fan and found it clever but cold, however brilliantly Oates weaves Dickinson’s images into the yarn.

What underscores all these tales is Oates’ brooding sense of loneliness and aloneness, that shock of recognition on the verge of the self’s certain extinction. “Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought,” Twain writes in The Mysterious Stranger. This may be the ultimate horror we all face. At the end of the Dickinson story, Oates sighs, “So lonely!” WILD NIGHTS! Stories About the Last Days of Poe, Dickinson, Twain, James, and Hemingway,