Zombie [NOOK Book]

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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 ...

See more details below

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 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly
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.)
From The Critics
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
From Barnes & Noble
Meet Quentin P., the most believably terrifying sexual psychopath and killer ever brought to life in fiction. The author deftly puts you inside the mind of a serial killer--succeeding not in writing about madness, but in writing with the logic of madness.

Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780061960116
  • Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
  • Publication date: 11/3/2009
  • Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
  • Format: eBook
  • Pages: 192
  • Sales rank: 43,754
  • File size: 1 MB
  • Items ship to U.S, APO/FPO and U.S. Protectorate addresses.

Meet the Author

Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
In a prolific and varied oeuvre that ranges over essays, plays, criticism, and several genres of fiction, Joyce Carol Oates has proved herself one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world.

Biography

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most influential and important storytellers in the literary world. She has often used her supreme narrative skills to examine the dark side of middle-class Americana, and her oeuvre includes some of the finest examples of modern essays, plays, criticism, and fiction from a vast array of genres. She is still publishing with a speed and consistency of quality nearly unheard of in contemporary literature.

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.

Good To Know

When not writing, Oates likes to take in a fight. "Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost," she says in highbrow fashion of the lowbrow sport.

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.

    1. Also Known As:
      Rosamond Smith
    2. Hometown:
      Princeton, New Jersey
    1. Date of Birth:
      June 16, 1938
    2. Place of Birth:
      Lockport, New York
    1. Education:
      B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961
Customer Reviews
Average Rating 3.5
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  • Posted October 19, 2011

    I Also Recommend:

    Travelin' Round Michigan with a Local Frankenstein

    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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  • Anonymous

    Posted June 22, 2005

    Horrifying!!

    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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