In the chilling world of Give Me Your Heart, the need for love is obsessive, self-destructive and unpredictable. It takes us to forbidden places, confronts us with gruesome truths, and leads us beyond our control.

In the unsettling 'Strip Poker,' a reckless teenage girl must turn the tables on a group of threatening young men. Can she outplay them? In the award-winning 'Smother!' a daughter's nightmarish childhood memory brings trouble to the door of her bourgeois mother. Which of them will win? In 'The First Husband,' a jealous man discovers his wife lied about her first marriage, and plans a cruel revenge. Will he go through with it?

In these and other powerful tales, children move beyond their parents' reach, wives and husbands wake up as strangers, haunted pasts intrude upon uncertain futures, and lives hang in the balance.

In ten razor-sharp stories, National Book Award winner Joyce Carol Oates shows that the most deadly mysteries often begin at home.