Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

From the Publisher

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.

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.)

Library Journal

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

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