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Meet Quentin P.
He is a problem for his professor father and his loving mother, though of course they do not believe the charge (sexual molestation of a minor) that got him in that bit of trouble.
He is a challenge for his court-appointed psychiatrist, who nonetheless is encouraged by the increasingly affirmative quality of his dreams and his openness in discussing them.
He is a thoroughly sweet young man for his wealthy grandmother, who gives him more and more, and can deny him less and less.
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 her boldest and most brilliant triumph yet—a dazzling work of art that extends the borders of the novel into the darkest heart of truth.
This unflinching, unforgettable fictional exploration into the life and mind of a paroled sex offender provides a psychologically astute portrait of the way cold calculation and dark obsession combine to make a serial killer both horrifyingly successful and maddeningly elusive.
A born storyteller, Oates has been spinning yarns since she was a little girl too young to even write. Instead, she would communicate her stories through drawings and paintings. When she received her very first typewriter at the age of 14, her creative floodgates opened with a torrent. She says she wrote "novel after novel" throughout high school and college -- a prolificacy that has continued unabated throughout a professional career that began in 1963 with her first short story collection, By the North Gate.
Oates's breakthrough occurred in 1969 with the publication of them, a National Book Award winner that established her as a force to be reckoned with. Since that auspicious beginning, she has been nominated for nearly every major literary honor -- from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the Pulitzer Prize -- and her fiction turns up with regularity on The New York Times annual list of Notable Books.
On average Oates publishes at least one novel, essay anthology, or story collection a year (during the 1970s, she produced at the astonishing rate of two or three books a year!). And although her fiction often exposes the darker side of America's brightest facades – familial unrest, sexual violence, the death of innocence – she has also made successful forays into Gothic novels, suspense, fantasy, and children's literature. As novelist John Barth once remarked, "Joyce Carol Oates writes all over the aesthetical map."
Where she finds the time for it no one knows, but Oates manages to combine her ambitious, prolific writing career with teaching: first at the University of Windsor in Canada, then (from 1978 on), at Princeton University in New Jersey. For all her success and fame, her daily routine of teaching and writing has changed very little, and her commitment to literature as a transcendent human activity remains steadfast.
Oates's Black Water, which is a thinly veiled account of Ted Kennedy's car crash in Chappaquiddick, was produced as an opera in the 1990s.
In 2001, Oprah Winfrey selected Oates's novel We Were the Mulvaneys for her Book Club.
EclecticReaderWR
Posted October 19, 2011
I Also Recommend:
If you recall, young Dr. Frankenstein set out to create life, only to create an abomination that he pursued to the top of the world. Shelly's book is about Frankenstein and his dilemma. Similarly, Quentin tries to create life, a zombie, a serf beholden to him in every way. Of course, he fails at each attempt. But he carries on, determined. Oates book is not as much about killing, though there's plenty of it and she devotes a large portion to Quentin planning and carrying out the capture of Squirrel, his name for a high school boy who infatuates him. It's more about Quentin: how he thinks and feels and looks; about his habits and his habitat; about how he relates to others; how he blames his victims for not responding as they should to his amateur lobotomizing; how he manipulates people, exemplified by how he treats his kindly grandmother. Not unsurprisingly, he is very human, except he is a sociopath gone over the edge into full-blown psychopathic behavior. And, thanks to Oates, you ride along in his brain that is at times infantile and cunning and narcissistic and vicious. Quentin is that unique breed of killer, the serial killer. These killers fascinate more than other murderers because their acts strike us as utterly incomprehensible and arbitrary. Murders of passion, revenge, and those incidental to other crimes like robbery, we understand these. The serial killer is different. He kills for no reason that is logical to us. We search for reasons but none seem satisfactory, not even that of illness. We simply can't put ourselves into the place of the serial killer, as we can with other types of murderers. Psychiatrists and psychologists explain serial killers but we find it difficult to connect emotionally with these killers. So, we turn to fiction for this missing link. Most fail us. But, thankfully, some serve us well, like JCO's ZOMBIE. Skillfully rendered in every respect. For other fiction that puts you in the mind of a psychopath, try Jim Thompson's THE KILLER INSIDE ME. Thompson was a brilliant observer of our worst instincts and this is among his best. John Fowles scored an instant hit with his first novel, THE COLLECTOR. Fred Clegg collects butterflies and young girls. Miranda is his first. And David Valentino's I, KILLER, about a killer at the end of his life, haunted to death by nightly visitors he calls The Pinstripes, and helped along to the abyss by a girl he names Sarah.
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Posted June 22, 2005
Joyce Carol Oates' Zombie terrified, shocked, and greatly angered me. I found myself cursing at and spitting venom at the fictional Q_P_. Not for the faint of heart!! Bravo, Mrs. Oates!
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Overview
Meet Quentin P.
He is a problem for his professor father and his loving mother, though of course they do not believe the charge (sexual molestation of a minor) that got him in that bit of trouble.
He is a challenge for his court-appointed psychiatrist, who nonetheless is encouraged by the increasingly affirmative quality of his dreams and his openness in discussing them.
He is a thoroughly sweet ...