"The physical world that gives birth to us, nurtures and contains and defines us, is not really our world. It is not the world we would have invented." Thus speaks the narrator of Joyce Carol Oates' tale "The Omen," for himself and for all the characters in Demon and other tales. In these seven stories of mystery and the macabre, the distinguished author of Night Side and Hauntings: Tales of the Grotesque offers readers passport to a world where the inexplicable undermines assumptions of what people know to be true, and whom they think they are. Strangely enough -- or perhaps not -- it is a world that perfectly mimics our own. Includes two previously unpublished stories.