BOOK REVIEW : The Visionary Power of Joyce Carol Oates : HEAT AND OTHER STORIES <i> by Joyce Carol Oates</i> ; Dutton; $21.95, 397 pages

Joyce Carol Oates is an anomaly in the world of literature, someone who deviates in excess of normal expectation. She’s so prolific that hardly has one of her books been reviewed, read and talked about before another appears.

Lately, her considerable power has taken a dark turn. In last year’s novel “Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My heart,” a finalist for the National Book Award, no subject, no voice, class, race, and--quite important--no level of violence seemed beyond her powers.

That novel opened with a human body being pried from the tangled filth of a river and went on to explore, in the most exquisitely fashioned prose, the lives of a white girl and a black boy responsible for the murder--not sparing a detail in evoking the bleak nature of their worlds and the confusion within their families. They were innocents, avenging angels at heart, their lives ruined in a single bloody moment.

In this new collection of short stories, titled “Heat and Other Stories,” there are strong shades of “Because It Is Bitter . . . “ not only because themes of race and family dominate, but because the violent realism, so strong in the novel, has gone way over the top. Rage, brutality and hatred have intensified to a fine hysterical point. Violence is endemic and perpetual.

In these 25 stories, if a murder or death doesn’t occur, it is usually at least contemplated. If a woman or child isn’t killed, she or he is beaten, verbally abused, kicked in the stomach, slapped, betrayed--set upon by lovers, by strangers, by hounds, by packs of children.

In “Leila Lee,” for instance, a child axes his abusive father to death.

In “Yarrow,” a quite ordinary man kills his cousin with his car in revenge for an unpaid debt of $500.

An unwanted child in “Family,” a futuristic tale that concludes the collection (and a chillingly brilliant one), is cast into a barrel of rats.

Animals fare no better: A cat is run over by a car and crawls onto an owner’s lap to die; a buck deer is shot through the neck and keels over on an old lady who is desperately trying to save it, and both perish.

Family is a rotten body politic, supper tables are “fields of tension” and “tangledness” is the primary fact of most lives. The loss of love is “a new and terrible subject” for everyone. But is it really so new and are the results really so deadly?

Yes, is Oates’ answer. We are strangers to one another. We have reached new levels of dysfunction and violence while spinning on a poisoned Earth.

“How can you keep living with someone you don’t know?” a character asks in “Shopping,” the story of a mother and daughter on a venal outing to a mall. “Eventually, you can,” a friend replies.

Oates maintains that we go on in these miserable states either by entering into narcoleptic states of denial or by creating myths of all kinds--romantic, religious, transcendental, mystical--in order “to deny the bleak unmitigated horror of biological life.”

We’re all just part of the food chain. Whatever violence there is exists quite naturally in the world of the food chain and the ups and downs in nature. Joel, in “House Hunting,” knows this: “Wasn’t there a natural rhythm, a ritual, of transgression and forgiveness, the loss of control of one’s self and the restoration of control?”

These stories are like dream poems of death and rage, so beautifully written and yet so unsparing in their depiction of a grisly, dark, cold world. They lead me to believe two things.

One is that Joyce Carol Oates is a visionary, a mirror to the world, a medium of the in-between. What we are between is civilization and chaos, world order and world upheaval. Oates is a lookout, peering ahead to give us a view.

Like the “Father” (he has only this generic name) in the story “Family,” she maintains, amid a decaying, despoiled world, “a rooftop vigil, white-clad, a noble ghostly figure holding binoculars to his eyes . . . a chronicler of these troubled time, like Thucydides.” The other thing I’m led to conclude is that Oates has chosen to get down and dirty. Not as down as Madonna and not as dirty as Brett Easton Ellis, but down and dirty in some of the same ways.

The result is a kind of I’m-going-to-shove-it-in-your-face fiction. She shows us women who are so weak that when they’re beaten or when they’re raped, they won’t report it. They’ll stagger on in silence. This continual, perpetual, horrendous silence--filled only by the minuscule monsters of lies (“bad” myths, if you will)--is too much to take.

“Heat” is a tour de force. But after the 15th or the 18th story, the violence reaches a repetitive stage. Violence is so fashionable these days, in film and popular culture, and easy to observe in a voyeuristic way. It’s too hard to accept its brute invasion of literature.

Granted we’re in a bit of a mess, we women and men, children and parents, lovers and loners of the late 20th Century. Yet, within our ranks are saints and heroes, redeemers, the old ones and the gracious ones. I wish Oates had let them in, just a little, to help a few tortured souls.

Next: Carolyn See reviews “Airman Mortensen” by Michael Blake (Seven Wolves Press).