There are two instinctive reactions to prolific writers. First there is the quantitative reaction (best expressed by the late Anthony Burgess), tending to regard, say, E.M. Forster (who published six novels in his lifetime, none of them in the last forty-seven years of his ninety-one-year life) as creatively costive. Many such would favour the all-encompassing Big Novel to the Jane Austen-like two inches of ivory. Then again, there is the thought that if they're so written so (apparently) quickly, surely they can't be any good...can they? But prolific output and literary quality sometimes do go together, and Joyce Carol Oates (born 1938) is an example.

Such a list (see bibliography, which omits books of poetry, plays, essays, non-fiction, and anthologies that she edited) is daunting indeed. Certainly not every novel succeeds - to my mind Expensive People is a strained attempt at black comedy; Childwold, despite powerful passages, is incoherent; Angel of Light falls curiously flat - but at her best she is one of the finest writers active today.

Her novels are various: long (Bellefleur is nearly 300,000 words) and short (I Lock My Door Upon Myself, Black Water and The Rise of Life on Earth are novella-length). Three of them form a series of pastiches of popular Victorian genres: family saga (Bellefleur), Gothic romance (A Bloodsmoor Romance) and detective story (Mysteries of Winterthurn), with a fourth projected. There are dramas of transgressive desire (inter-racial in Because It is Bitter, and Because It is My Heart and I Lock My Door Upon Myself, incestuous in You Must Remember This and the title novella of A Sentimental Education). There are exercises in what could be called the dark side of nostalgia (You Must Remember This and Foxfire, both set in the late 1950s and early 1960s - the latter contains a very disturbing episode involving a dwarf). Marya: A Life, one of her best, is semi-autobiographical. The three novels published as "Rosamond Smith" (a name derived from that of her husband, Raymond Smith) are horror/suspense thrillers.

Although she is published as a mainstream writer, and has had short stories published in a wide variety of literary venues, she is no stranger to horror. Her fiction is often dark and violent, with a particular focus on obsessive states of mind. She has published stories in genre magazines such as Twilight Zone and Omni and anthologies like Skin of the Soul (edited by Lisa Tuttle, 1990) and Metahorror (edited by Dennis Etchison, 1992), and five times in Datlow & Windling's Year's Best Fantasy & Horror. Certainly, stories like "Martyrdom" (from Metahorror, reprinted in Datlow & Windling's Sixth Annual Collection and Haunted) can outdo almost anyone for gruesomeness. The story juxtaposes an abused woman and a laboratory rat; the ending, probably inspired by Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, is stomach-wrenching. In 1994 she was awarded a Stoker Award for continuing achievement.

A writer of horror, then. But it makes more sense to regard Oates as a writer who uses horror, who employs some of its devices, than a genre writer. Supernatural/fantastic events are virtually absent. (Night-Side and Haunted collect occasional exceptions; the protagonist's visions in Son of the Morning, one of the finest out-of-genre horror novels of the last couple of decades, have a rational explanation.) Horror in Oates derives from people's behaviour and states of mind: even bizarre events like the birth of Germaine, the heroine of Bellefleur (she absorbs a male twin in the womb: all that is left of him are his genitals, growing from her chest), are not impossible, however unusual they may be.

And then there is Oates's style. The opposite of generic, it is quite distinctive. At times it seems out of control, words and impressions coming in a rush, so that the reader has to go with the flow. This is particularly marked in Bellefleur, to the extent that Oates has to include an author's note to justify it. (Compare the opening sentence with that of Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits: both are a page long, but Oates's language is chaotic, turbulent, violent - by contrast Allende's seems the epitome of authorial control.) Oates uses "literary" devices such as stream of consciousness (hence the occasional long sentences) and is particularly fond of the present tense, though almost always in the third person. (Even a more generic novel like Lives of the Twins is told in the present.) The use of pastiche as in the three "Victorian" novels, the experiments with form (such as the short-short "narrative fragments" collected in The Assignation reveal a highly literary sensibility (she is a Professor of Humanities at Princeton University).

Also there is a willingness to expand her range: her characters encompass a wide social spectrum from the proletariat (countless examples) to the brittle intellectual campus set (as in Unholy Loves and American Appetites, the latter also a courtroom drama). The protagonist of Son of the Morning is an evangelist preacher who is granted seven visions, each more terrifying than the last: the scene where, on live TV, he takes literally the saying "If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out", is hard to shake off.

As an example, take "Golden Gloves" (collected in Raven's Wing). Oates is clearly no supporter of the belief that a writer can only write about subjects she has experienced at first hand: the first half of the story follows the protagonist's boxing career before an injury brings it to an end; the rest of the story deals with his experience of becoming a father for the first time. Oates is clearly a boxing aficionado (she published a monograph, On Boxing, in 1987 - and the sport also features in You Must Remember This), but is unlikely to have participated in it for obvious reasons; also, she has herself never had children. (Autobiographical details are often misleading, at best irrelevant, but here a knowledge of them shows how successful Oates is in this story, which is utterly convincing.)

Horror there is in Oates's work aplenty, though its own distinctive blend. Her output is prodigious, and still continuing. Still only in her fifties, we can hope for much more work to come.

1964 With Shuddering Fall

1967 A Garden of Earthly Delights

1968 Expensive People

1969 them

1971 Wonderland

1973 Do With Me What You Will

1975 The Assassins

1976 Childwold

1977 The Triumph of the Spider Monkey

1978 Son of the Morning

1979 Cybele

Unholy Loves

1980 Bellefleur

1981 Angel of Light

1982 A Bloodsmoor Romance

1984 Mysteries of Winterthurn

1985 Solstice

1986 Marya: A Life

1987 You Must Remember This

Lives of the Twins [UK title: Kindred Passions - as "Rosamond Smith"]

1989 American Appetites

Soul/Mate [as "Rosamond Smith"]

1990 I Lock My Door Upon Myself

Because It is Bitter, and Because It is My Heart

1991 The Rise of Life on Earth

1992 Black Water

Nemesis [as "Rosamond Smith"]

1993 Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl-Gang

1994 What I Lived For

1995 Zombie

1963 By the North Gate

1966 Upon the Sweeping Flood

1970 The Wheel of Love

1972 Marriages and Infidelities

1974 Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Stories of Young America

The Goddess and Other Women

The Hungry Ghosts

1975 The Poisoned Kiss

The Seduction and Other Stories

1976 Crossing the Border

1977 Night-Side

1979 All the Good People I've Left Behind

1980 A Sentimental Education

1984 Last Days

1986 Raven's Wing

1989 The Assignation

1991 Heat

1992 Where Is Here?

1994 Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque