Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION OAT | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Meet Quentin P. He is a problem for his professor father and his loving mother. He is a challenge for his court-appointed psychiatrist. He is a thoroughly sweet young man for his wealthy grandmother. He is the most believable and thoroughly terrifying sexual psychopath and killer ever to be brought to life in fiction, as Joyce Carol Oates achieves a bold and brilliant triumph-a dazzling work of art that extends the borders of the novel into the darkest heart of truth.
Author Notes
Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin.
She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart.
She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
Oates 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. Upon entering the psyche of Quentin P--, once arrested for the sexual assault of a young boy, Oates proceeds to reveal the demented scheming behind his abduction and torture of numerous victims--murders that remain essentially unknown to Quentin's parents, doctors, therapists, and parole counselors alike. 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. --Alice Joyce
Kirkus Review
Oates (What I Live For, 1994, etc.) is at her most Grand Guignol in this searing study of a psychopathic killer. Quentin P___, son of the distinguished philosopher/physicist of Mt. Vernon State University, Professor R___ P___, has supportive parents, a doting grandmother, and a cautiously approving sister, principal of Mt. Vernon Middle School. Since his arrest for assaulting a 12-year-old boy from the projects, he's also acquired a therapist, a group therapist, and a probation officer. And none of them suspects that underneath his mask of propriety and compliance (``YES SIR. NO MA'AM''), Quentin seethes in isolation and anger; or that in his attempt to create a zombie slave who gives him unconditional loyalty and love (``God bless you, Master....You are good, Master. You are kind & merciful''), he's already killed three men, victims of the hideously botched transorbital lobotomies he performs with ice pick and textbook; or that he is on the scent of a fourth. Quentin's stalkings and killings are described, unnervingly, with exactly the same combination of matter-of-fact detail and simmering rage as his accounts of meeting his therapy group or doing errands for his grandma. The effect is not to empty his crimes or his madness of their horror, but to link Quentin to us by dispersing the horror through the rituals of ordinary bourgeois life in the Detroit suburbs. As readers of the excerpt Oates published last year in The New Yorker can attest, it's a deeply disturbing experience to watch Quentin regarding himself, his family, his would-be zombies and their bones with the same focus-free lens, an eye that makes no distinction between I and thou and ityet Oates's portrait never really tells us anything we didn't learn from American Psycho or The Collector or The Voyeur. Minor Oates, then, but a raw, scorching draft just the same.
Library Journal Review
Quentin P. is 31 years old, single, and the son of a well-respected college professor. He has his own apartment in the university town where he lives and attends classes at a local technical college. He is also a convicted sex offender (now out on parole) and a serial killer. In Oates's riveting new novel the reader is cunningly drawn inside Quentin's mind as he carefully plans and carries out a gruesome murder. With a deceptively simple prose style, Oates forces us to feel the calculating rationality behind Quentin's madness. What 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. Highly recommended for public libraries of all sizes. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/95.]Nancy Pearl, Washington Ctr. for the Book, Seattle (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
