Joyce Carol Oates is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize, and has been several times nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.
"Enthralling. . . . Harrowing. . . . Oates scores aggressively with this novel." - Chicago Tribune"Joyce Carol Oates takes the worst nightmares and runs with them. . . . Impressive." - San Francisco ExaminerWhat gives this novel its awesome power is Oates's ability to convice us that Quentin might be anyone: a casual acquaintance, a friend, or a brother. Compulsively readable and impossible to forget, this should both win the prolific Oates new fans and satisfy her longtime readers. - Library JournalOates repeatedly exhibits the unwavering ability to depict the shadowy, at times malignant, aspects of human nature. Her latest endeavor is perhaps her most chilling novel to date, a diary with the eerie familiarity of yesterday's headlines, written by a sexually obsessed serial killer... With striking parallels to published reports of Jeffrey Dahmer's crimes, it is difficult not to conjure up that killer's image or to imagine his very thoughts and the rituals portrayed in the press as being perpetrated by him. Still, Oates compels the reader onward to the very last page of a horrifying, revelatory work of fiction. - Booklist
Periodically, Oates seems compelled to write grim novels that explore humanity's darkest corners. Coming on the heels of last year's excellent What I Lived For, this depressing narrative carries macabre imagination to the extreme. It depicts the career of Quentin P., a convicted young sex offender on probation who has turned to serial killing without being caught, despite the worried scrutiny of his family and of his psychiatrist. Convincingly presented as Quentin's diary of his pursuit of the perfect ``zombie'' (a handsome young man to be rendered compliant and devoted through Quentin's lobotomizing him with an ice pick), the narrative incorporates crude drawings and typographic play to evoke the hermetic imagination of a psychopath; the reader examines the killer's sketches of weapons and staring eyes, and hears him say, ``I lost it & screamed at him & shook him BUT I DID NOT HURT HIM I SWEAR.'' For all its apparent authenticity, however, this novel ventures into territory that has been explored more powerfully by, among others, Dennis Cooper (Frisk), whose chilly minimalism underscores the brutality of such crimes in a way that Oates's more calculatedly histrionic approach does not. This slim, sadistic reverie may be chilling, but it comes off as less a fully realized work than as an exercise from a writer at morbid play. (Oct.)
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