Description: Unflinching and unforgettable, devastating in its impact, Joyce Carol Oate's fictional journey into the mind of paroled sex offender Quentin P. provides a psychologically astute portrait of the way cold calculation and dark obsession combine in a serial killer. Oates is the award-winning author of 26 novels.
Brief description:
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.
Review Quotes:
"Enthralling. . . . Harrowing. . . . Oates scores aggressively with this novel." - Chicago Tribune
"Joyce Carol Oates takes the worst nightmares and runs with them. . . . Impressive." - San Francisco Examiner
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. - Library Journal
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... 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