Exclamation points may not come to mind when you think of Emily Dickinson, but that connection is just one of the surprises that this collection of stories by Joyce Carol Oates has in store.

Fictionalizing the last days of Dickinson and fellow writers Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James and Ernest Hemingway, Oates has managed to merge their sensibilities and styles with her own. "Wild Nights!," which takes its title from a Dickinson poem, is an imaginative, impressive work that spotlights yet another side of Oates' prodigious talent.

The settings for the stories are suggested by writings by her subjects, Oates says. So Poe's tale, related as a series of diary entries, shows how he slowly goes mad as the keeper of a lighthouse in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile. Twain is "Grandpa Clemens," exchanging letters with a young girl who becomes one of his adored "Angelfish."

For James, the fictional hook is service as a volunteer in a hospital caring for World War I soldiers suffering the kind of harsh miseries that are far from the genteel topics of his hyperbolic prose. And Hemingway's end comes in Idaho, where he is first seen practicing firing a shotgun with his big toe.

The Dickinson story is the most inventive, with the poet transformed into EDickinsonRepliLuxe, a futuristic clone, "a brilliantly rendered mannikin empowered by a computer program that is the distillation of the original individual, as if his or her essence, or 'soul' — if you believe in the concept — had been sucked out of the original being, and reinstalled."

Nothing good can come out of tampering with nature like that, of course, and Oates' inventiveness runs free. What her regular readers will find most intriguing is how she maintains her typical sense of a vague menace lurking just off the page but still manages to marry her style to that of her subject. Early in the Dickinson story, she writes forebodingly:

"There is an hour when you realize: Here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time."

Not all of the stories in "Wild Nights!" work as well. The opening to the Hemingway piece veers dangerously close to parody:

"He wanted to die. He loaded the shotgun. Both barrels he loaded. This had to be a joke, both barrels he loaded. He was a man with a sense of humor. He was a joker."

But most of the time, Oates, her subjects and her material meld in a way that will satisfy readers, regardless of whether they have studied the writers whose lives she reanimates and refashions in her own style. The result is fresh and welcome — at times, even wild.

dsinger@post-dispatch.com | 314-340-8169