The Museum of Dr. Moses

The Museum of Dr. Moses: Tales of Mystery and Suspense is a short story collection by Joyce Carol Oates^[1] comprising ten thriller and horror stories. The collection was published in 2007 by Harcourt.

The collection includes ten stories. All were previously published, as indicated:

• "Hi! Howya Doin!" (Ploughshares, Spring 2007, as "Hi Howya Doin")
• "Suicide Watch" (Playboy, May 2006)
• "The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza" (anthology Murder on the Ropes: Original Boxing Mysteries, 2001)
• "Valentine, July Heat Wave" (Harper's Bazaar UK, July 2006)
• "Bad Habits" (Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Winter 2005/2006)
• "Feral" (Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1998)
• "The Hunter" (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, November 2003)
• "The Twins: A Mystery" (Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine, December 2002)
• "Stripping" (Postscripts, Spring 2004)
• "The Museum of Dr. Moses" (anthology The Museum of Horrors, 2001)

In "The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza" a woman's world is upended when she learns the brutal truth about a family friend's death—and what her father is capable of. Meanwhile, a businessman desperate to find his missing two-year-old grandson in "Suicide Watch" must determine whether the horrifying tale his junkie son tells him about the boy's whereabouts is a confession or a sick test. In "Valentine, July Heat Wave" a man prepares a gruesome surprise for the wife determined to leave him. And the children of a BTK-style serial killer struggle to decode the patterns behind their father's seemingly random bad acts, as well as their own, in "Bad Habits."

Kirkus Reviews described the collection as "surreal interior landscapes, shamelessly incantatory prose and an enduring ambivalence toward the neo-gothic conventions from which Oates draws her power to shock and dismay."^[2]