P. who often refers to himself in the third person, giving us a peak behind the curtain of this fictional serial killer and his dissociation, or at least conscious distinction between his persona versus his real identity.

ZOMBIE | Kirkus Reviews

E., who is my “personal therapist,” paid by Dad, is always asking, What is the nature of your fantasies, Quentin? That equally short novel consisted entirely of a dramatization of the tortured consciousness of a character modeled on Mary Jo Kopechne as she was drowning. Lemme go, man—” and I told him he could stay for a while, it was all right to stay for a while, and I’d pay him for his trouble, and he said he wouldn’t tell anybody if I let him go, but I knew better.

After a brief phase of “foot-kissing”, or, being lenient and doing Janie’s chores for her, her husband, Logan Killicks, eventually begins to “treat her as just another person who works on his farm” (Cardona).

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates | Goodreads

Unfortunately for her, her grandkids are an unmarried career woman and an introverted gay serial killer. The chapters range from a few sentences to a few pages in length, and reads similar to a journal that would’ve been kept by the character.Upon its publication in 1995, Zombie was proclaimed the author’s “boldest, most disturbing masterwork… demonstrating why Oates ranks among America’s most respected and accomplished literary artists. Oates eventually drew on aspects of her grandmother's life in writing the novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007). He accuses Janie of having an entitled attitude, and says to Janie, “You think youse white folks by de way you act…Ah’m too honest and hard-workin’ for anybody in yo’ family. He notes however that after the beating the kid endured from the kidnapping, he is not as attractive as he once was.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates - Suntup Editions Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates - Suntup Editions

The variety of topics covered in this collection of 27 essays is as remarkable as the proliferation of insights each contains.com/issues/31/articles/1310 Archived September 20, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, BOMB Magazine Spring 1990. Keeping thes Oates's career and mostly admire her as a critic (although I think she is misguided in her evaluation of James M. Smith died of complications from pneumonia on February 18, 2008, and the death affected Oates profoundly. Cain's Mildred Pierce), from what little I've read of her fiction thus far, I find that I admire her more than like her; her fiction seems almost wholly intellectually-driven, like Graham Greene's (he of the machine-tooled prose): it lacks that ineffable spark of life that characterizes my favorite works.

American Psycho - The New York Times Web Archive

In 2004, Oates described the partnership as "a marriage of like minds – both my husband and I are so interested in literature and we read the same books; he'll be reading a book and then I'll read it – we trade and we talk about our reading at meal times.The Peeping Tom: Quentin spies on Squirrel from his grandma's yard when he goes swimming in his friends pool, liking the way the boy "teases" him. The house is a tall, narrow red-brick Victorian with a smudged look like somebody moved his thumb across it. And the insides with more such drawings on centerfold models of male muscle-bodies and parts of certain photos scissored out. Rather than being offered constructive criticism, she is constantly surrounded by negativity and recognition of her faults rather than her strong points, thus preventing her from developing into a better person or finding happiness. Each of the six performers chosen to narrate Oates’s collection of dark character studies suits the atmosphere of malaise and despair that emerges from the author’s odd, elegant prose.