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Plot Summary
The Frenzy is a collection of nine short stories organized into three parts, each containing three stories. The stories share recurring concerns with predatory relationships, grief, loss, familial estrangement, and the fragile boundary between civilized behavior and violence.
Part 1 opens with the title story, "The Frenzy," in which Cassidy, a 46-year-old married father, drives to Cape May, New Jersey, in December with Brianna Rinzler, the nearly 20-year-old daughter of family friends. He first became fixated on Brianna at a high school Christmas concert when she was 16 and connects his compulsion to a feeding frenzy he witnessed off Provincetown, millions of fish devouring one another. At Cape May, when Brianna drops her phone on the beach, Cassidy hurls it into the ocean and walks the sobbing girl roughly to the car. He checks them into a hotel suite and sexually coerces her while she is sedated on painkillers. The next morning she is gone, having taken his clothes, wallet, keys, phone, and car, leaving only a raggedy doll. A knock at the door raises his hopes, but it is only housekeeping.
"The Fear" traces two girl-cousins, Janette and Juliet, born 11 months apart. At Janette's sixth birthday, Juliet is absent; eventually the adults reveal Juliet has Ewing's sarcoma, a rare childhood cancer affecting her jaw and left eye. Multiple surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy follow. When Janette visits, she confronts a disfigured child with a drooping glassy eye and a mismatched jaw. At school Janette avoids her cousin, unwilling to be associated with the disfigurement. One winter afternoon she spots Juliet on the street and watches adult pedestrians stare, wanting to rush to her side but unable to. In their freshman year at separate Michigan universities, Juliet leaves a phone message saying she is lonely; Janette never returns the call. Seven weeks into the term, Juliet is found comatose from an overdose and dies at 19, despite being cancer-free. Catching her reflection in a lagoon, Janette perceives her own face as disfigured, as though Juliet's suffering has become her own.
"The Bicycle Accident" spans decades in the life of Arlette Hansen and her daughter Evie in Strykersville, New York. While Arlette prepares a backyard engagement party, Rob Nash, a wealthy family friend who has lent money to Arlette's husband, Kevin, takes 13-year-old Evie to buy ice; they are gone nearly an hour. During the party, a hospital calls: Evie has crashed her bicycle on a bridge, shattering her knee and skull and losing her front teeth. During convalescence Evie draws cruel caricatures; Arlette alone recognizes one as resembling Rob. Evie refuses to see Rob; when pressed, she tells Arlette, "You should know." The story implies Rob molested Evie during the errand and that her reckless ride was a response. Evie grows hostile, drops out of school at 17, and drifts across the country. Years later, after Kevin dies, Evie visits Arlette at her assisted-living facility and asks about Rob's will. Learning nothing was received, she murmurs, "It was all for nothing, then." Arlette signs a blank check for Evie. While Arlette dozes, Evie removes her mother's dentures, pockets them, and slips away.
Part 2 opens with "The Call," in which a woman identified only as S. receives a predawn phone call informing her that her father died that morning, though she insists he died six years earlier. She drives north to her birthplace, Yewville, and enters the family house. As she helps her mother prepare to bathe, the story reveals that her father actually died at 36 in a factory accident when S. was 12. S. never went to university, never married, never held the prestigious job she imagined. She has been her mother's caretaker for decades.
In "The Return," a narrator named Maude visits her widowed friend Audra Klein after two years of pandemic-era avoidance. Audra's second husband, Thad, a renowned professor, died of swift-acting cancer in early 2020. At Audra's stone house along the Delaware River, Maude notices a .22 rifle on a table. Over lunch, Audra narrates a recurring predawn experience: Thad appears walking up the driveway carrying the newspaper as he always did. She describes their desperate reunion, his confusion, his irritability, and his collapsing into bed despite her protests. Audra falls silent, and Maude flees. Hurrying down the driveway, she grasps the rifle's purpose: protection against the dead husband's return.
"The Redwoods" follows Jacob Vanbrugh, called Vann, across his life and beyond his death. At 23, hiking alone in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, he observes a man bullying a young woman called Lise and feels compelled to protect her but does not act. He enters law school and joins the Innocence Project, which aids wrongly convicted people, but his resolve fades. For decades he glimpses, or believes he glimpses, the young woman in airports, stations, and hospitals, always young while he ages. He marries a woman named Elise, whose name echoes Lise. At 52 he dies of a brain aneurysm, and the narrative continues from his disembodied perspective. Elise accuses his memory of never truly loving her. Multiple contradictory versions of the encounter cycle through the text, none resolving. The story returns to its foundational image: Vanbrugh motionless at the base of a fallen redwood, having not moved in minutes or in decades.
Part 3 opens with "Small Veins," narrated in second person, in which a recently widowed woman with a chronic, slow-growing leukemia visits an oncology blood lab. Her consultation reveals some worsening. Afterward, her oncologist, Dr. G__, confides that his own 19-year-old daughter recently died of a medication overdose. The story closes with the statement that only halfway home will the narrator understand why the doctor shared his story.
In "Refuge," Lorene, a young day-care worker, drives 96 miles to a Buddhist monastery in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to retrieve her husband, Marcus Coyne. Marcus, a controlling man 11 years her senior who holds an MD, left 37 days earlier without explanation. Before his departure, their rescue dog Little Bear vanished; Lorene suspects Marcus. Shortly after, Marcus closed his hands around her throat. After weeks of silence, he called late at night from what sounded like the monastery, prompting Lorene's drive. Staff refuse to confirm his presence. Lorene finds Marcus on the road, gaunt and euphoric. He insists they hike to a watchtower to "re-consecrate" their marriage, but on the trail his mood turns menacing. He attacks Lorene, punching and strangling her. She fights free with a rock and runs bleeding toward the road.
The collection closes with "Night Fishing at Antibes," in which two widows near the Institute for Advanced Study in Millstone, New Jersey, forge an unlikely friendship. Zahira Kruk, an aloof literary translator, and Meghan Dunne, a warmer, more sociable woman, grow close after their husbands die within the same year. Zahira fixates on the marriage of Ilya Greb, a Nobel Prize-winning immunologist who was infatuated with her decades earlier. At lunch at the Grebs' home, Ilya, who now uses a wheelchair, announces he has poisoned them all with parasitic slugs in the salad dressing, then declares it a joke. The women flee, collapsing into laughter. Rather than going home, they drive to a nursery and buy saplings and flowers. Zahira insists on paying, declaring it a birthday gift for Meghan that must be given that very day.
Part 1 opens with the title story, "The Frenzy," in which Cassidy, a 46-year-old married father, drives to Cape May, New Jersey, in December with Brianna Rinzler, the nearly 20-year-old daughter of family friends. He first became fixated on Brianna at a high school Christmas concert when she was 16 and connects his compulsion to a feeding frenzy he witnessed off Provincetown, millions of fish devouring one another. At Cape May, when Brianna drops her phone on the beach, Cassidy hurls it into the ocean and walks the sobbing girl roughly to the car. He checks them into a hotel suite and sexually coerces her while she is sedated on painkillers. The next morning she is gone, having taken his clothes, wallet, keys, phone, and car, leaving only a raggedy doll. A knock at the door raises his hopes, but it is only housekeeping.
"The Fear" traces two girl-cousins, Janette and Juliet, born 11 months apart. At Janette's sixth birthday, Juliet is absent; eventually the adults reveal Juliet has Ewing's sarcoma, a rare childhood cancer affecting her jaw and left eye. Multiple surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy follow. When Janette visits, she confronts a disfigured child with a drooping glassy eye and a mismatched jaw. At school Janette avoids her cousin, unwilling to be associated with the disfigurement. One winter afternoon she spots Juliet on the street and watches adult pedestrians stare, wanting to rush to her side but unable to. In their freshman year at separate Michigan universities, Juliet leaves a phone message saying she is lonely; Janette never returns the call. Seven weeks into the term, Juliet is found comatose from an overdose and dies at 19, despite being cancer-free. Catching her reflection in a lagoon, Janette perceives her own face as disfigured, as though Juliet's suffering has become her own.
"The Bicycle Accident" spans decades in the life of Arlette Hansen and her daughter Evie in Strykersville, New York. While Arlette prepares a backyard engagement party, Rob Nash, a wealthy family friend who has lent money to Arlette's husband, Kevin, takes 13-year-old Evie to buy ice; they are gone nearly an hour. During the party, a hospital calls: Evie has crashed her bicycle on a bridge, shattering her knee and skull and losing her front teeth. During convalescence Evie draws cruel caricatures; Arlette alone recognizes one as resembling Rob. Evie refuses to see Rob; when pressed, she tells Arlette, "You should know." The story implies Rob molested Evie during the errand and that her reckless ride was a response. Evie grows hostile, drops out of school at 17, and drifts across the country. Years later, after Kevin dies, Evie visits Arlette at her assisted-living facility and asks about Rob's will. Learning nothing was received, she murmurs, "It was all for nothing, then." Arlette signs a blank check for Evie. While Arlette dozes, Evie removes her mother's dentures, pockets them, and slips away.
Part 2 opens with "The Call," in which a woman identified only as S. receives a predawn phone call informing her that her father died that morning, though she insists he died six years earlier. She drives north to her birthplace, Yewville, and enters the family house. As she helps her mother prepare to bathe, the story reveals that her father actually died at 36 in a factory accident when S. was 12. S. never went to university, never married, never held the prestigious job she imagined. She has been her mother's caretaker for decades.
In "The Return," a narrator named Maude visits her widowed friend Audra Klein after two years of pandemic-era avoidance. Audra's second husband, Thad, a renowned professor, died of swift-acting cancer in early 2020. At Audra's stone house along the Delaware River, Maude notices a .22 rifle on a table. Over lunch, Audra narrates a recurring predawn experience: Thad appears walking up the driveway carrying the newspaper as he always did. She describes their desperate reunion, his confusion, his irritability, and his collapsing into bed despite her protests. Audra falls silent, and Maude flees. Hurrying down the driveway, she grasps the rifle's purpose: protection against the dead husband's return.
"The Redwoods" follows Jacob Vanbrugh, called Vann, across his life and beyond his death. At 23, hiking alone in Humboldt Redwoods State Park, he observes a man bullying a young woman called Lise and feels compelled to protect her but does not act. He enters law school and joins the Innocence Project, which aids wrongly convicted people, but his resolve fades. For decades he glimpses, or believes he glimpses, the young woman in airports, stations, and hospitals, always young while he ages. He marries a woman named Elise, whose name echoes Lise. At 52 he dies of a brain aneurysm, and the narrative continues from his disembodied perspective. Elise accuses his memory of never truly loving her. Multiple contradictory versions of the encounter cycle through the text, none resolving. The story returns to its foundational image: Vanbrugh motionless at the base of a fallen redwood, having not moved in minutes or in decades.
Part 3 opens with "Small Veins," narrated in second person, in which a recently widowed woman with a chronic, slow-growing leukemia visits an oncology blood lab. Her consultation reveals some worsening. Afterward, her oncologist, Dr. G__, confides that his own 19-year-old daughter recently died of a medication overdose. The story closes with the statement that only halfway home will the narrator understand why the doctor shared his story.
In "Refuge," Lorene, a young day-care worker, drives 96 miles to a Buddhist monastery in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to retrieve her husband, Marcus Coyne. Marcus, a controlling man 11 years her senior who holds an MD, left 37 days earlier without explanation. Before his departure, their rescue dog Little Bear vanished; Lorene suspects Marcus. Shortly after, Marcus closed his hands around her throat. After weeks of silence, he called late at night from what sounded like the monastery, prompting Lorene's drive. Staff refuse to confirm his presence. Lorene finds Marcus on the road, gaunt and euphoric. He insists they hike to a watchtower to "re-consecrate" their marriage, but on the trail his mood turns menacing. He attacks Lorene, punching and strangling her. She fights free with a rock and runs bleeding toward the road.
The collection closes with "Night Fishing at Antibes," in which two widows near the Institute for Advanced Study in Millstone, New Jersey, forge an unlikely friendship. Zahira Kruk, an aloof literary translator, and Meghan Dunne, a warmer, more sociable woman, grow close after their husbands die within the same year. Zahira fixates on the marriage of Ilya Greb, a Nobel Prize-winning immunologist who was infatuated with her decades earlier. At lunch at the Grebs' home, Ilya, who now uses a wheelchair, announces he has poisoned them all with parasitic slugs in the salad dressing, then declares it a joke. The women flee, collapsing into laughter. Rather than going home, they drive to a nursery and buy saplings and flowers. Zahira insists on paying, declaring it a birthday gift for Meghan that must be given that very day.
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By Joyce Carol Oates
