Identify the Stylist

[For the previous round of this game, click here.]

Think of this as the literary equivalent of the old game show Name That Tune.  Can you identify the author of the following passage based on its stylistic hallmarks?

Haunted houses, forbidden houses.  The old Medlock farm.  The Erlich farm.  The Minton farm on Elk Creek.  NO TRESPASSING the signs said but we trespassed at will.  NO TRESPASSING NO HUNTING NO FISHING  UNDER PENALTY OF LAW but we did what we pleased because who was there to stop us?

Our parents warned us against exploring these abandoned properties: the old houses and barns were dangerous, they said.  We could get hurt, they said.  I asked my mother if the houses were haunted and she said, Of course not, there aren't such things as ghosts, you know that.  She was irritated with me; she guessed how I pretended to believe things I didn't believe, things I'd grown out of years before.  It was a habit of childhood--pretending I was younger, more childish, than in fact I was.  Opening my eyes and looking puzzled, worried.  Girls are prone to such trickery, it's a form of camouflage, when every other thought you think is a forbidden thought and with your eyes open staring sightless you can sink into dreams that leave your skin clammy and your heart pounding--dreams that don't seem to belong to you that must have come to you from somewhere else from someone you don't know who knows you.

There weren't such things as ghosts, they told us.  That was just superstition.  But we could injure ourselves tramping around where we weren't wanted--the floorboards and the staircases in old houses were likely to be rotted, the roofs ready to collapse, we could cut ourselves on nails and broken glass, we could fall into uncovered wells--and you never knew who you might meet up with, in an old house or barn that's supposed to be empty.  "You mean a bum?--like somebody hitch-hiking along the road?" I asked.  "It could be a bum, or it could be someone you know," Mother told me evasively.  "A man, or a boy--somebody you know..."  Her voice trailed off in embarrassment and I knew enough not to ask another question.

The distinctly female point of view (and a narrator given to transgressive behavior as a young girl)...

The theme of mother-daughter strife...

The Gothic settings (American farmhouses in ruins)...

The long paragraphs and labyrinthine sentences...

...This must be the work of Joyce Carol Oates.

(The passage is taken from the opening [p. 3-4] of the title story of Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque.)