Charles Baxter v Joyce Carol Oates: two types of violence

Ghosts, one of the recent stories collected in Charles Baxter's "Gryphon," is one of Baxter's strangest and most elusive stories. A woman - single mom, temporarily living with her father who's recovering from a serious stroke, in front of the house weeding, listening to her infant son via a baby monitor, is confronted by a strange man who stops in front of her house, talks to her, then even follows her into the house - she has to tell him to "please ... get the fuck away." Have you read this far in Gryphon? Then you know that ultimately this man will not physically harm the woman, that no grave accident of event will occur - Baxter's stories almost always gravitate toward the safe and the sane - but this story is disturbing because of what you could call its interior violence, far more troubling than the ultra-violent - imagine how Joyce Carol Oates, for example, would develop a story from this premise. Over time the woman makes contact with the strange man, he actually takes her out to dinner, to the amazement of the woman and one of her friends, they even have sex - and then the man tells the woman that he grew up in the neighborhood (initially, he'd lied and said he lived in that house), that he knew her mom, who was in fact suffering from traumatic stress and was insane, that her mom scared the shit out of him when he was a kid and she burst into his house and tried to kidnap him (she'd lost a 2-year-old to illness). So there's a kind of revenge going on here, but the story is especially haunting because of the delicate way Baxter handles and develops the woman's psyche: how she's drawn to this dangerous man, he meets some need for her, whether penance, or freedom, breaking free from her father, learning the truth about her mysterious mother - no question definitively answered, but a really strong and strange short sketch about a character in crisis and how she emerges whole.