Zombies (using an ice pick)

I just finished Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates. From the first to the last page this is horror. Q_ P_ and all of his appointments with Mr. T_, Dr. E_, and Dr. B_. H-O-R-R-I-B-L-E stuff. The serial killer hides in plain sight. And everyone fawning over him and all his unrealized P-O-T-E-N-T-I-A-L. Cause you can't be NICE ENOUGH or ACCOMMODATING ENOUGH to someone who wants to make ZOMBIES (using an ice pick). Cause probably, you know, there was some trauma in his past. That's NOT CLEAR. But if everyone's NICE ENOUGH to him and TREATS HIM WITH ENOUGH RESPECT, you know, he won't kill anyone else.

Right? Maybe? Hope so.

This book unearths all those THEORIES, like it gets a trowel out and drags it through the dirt leaving gouges…and you're kind of like, yeah, aren't we the STUPID ONES?

Joyce Carol Oates is an incisive psychological writer. Again. And again. And again. She brings something fearless to the pages and even when it's such C-H-I-L-L-I-N-G HORROR that you ask yourself: Why am I reading this? you have to acknowledge she's one PHINE WRITER.

How to Read a Short Story

I finish reading Black Dahlia & White Rose, a collection of seriously creepy stories by Joyce Carol Oates. Although I'm not a huge fan of short stories, this is the third short story collection I've read in the past year. Leaf Storm by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Red Garden by Alice Hoffman being the other two. They are growing on me, these books of short stories.

Leaf Storm is incredible. So is The Red Garden. The stories in Leaf Storm revolve around Macondo, a fictional town in Colombia. They are horizontal because they all take place in about the same time period. The stories in The Red Garden are about Blackwell, Massachusetts and they are vertical in that the tales occur in a linear progression through time.

The twine that binds the stories in Black Orchid & White Rose is twisting. Oate's needle inserts itself into the human psyche and extracts disturbing grey matter. A few of them are really good for what they are: biopsies.

The trick I've found to reading short stories is reading them one day at a time. Kind of a reading hors d'oeuvre. That works well. It can take me a while to get through them, but I enjoy them more that way. It gives me at least twenty-four hours to absorb what I've read.

This Particular Set of Russian Nesting Dolls

I finish reading The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates and stare at the ceiling, the back of my hand against my forehead. Try to think. It's not like The Falls, the book that I l loved, at all. And yet I don't hate it, and there is satisfaction in the ending along with that axe grinding. I mean there is JCO's fierce writing, but the first word that comes to mind is: sprawling. It's a sprawling novel, running hither and yon within the sharp confines of a small world that is Princeton.

The plot is like a Russian nesting doll. There is a plot within a plot within a plot within a plot and they all fit together very nicely. All the loose ends—well, by the time you reach The Covenant there are none. Not one. So the next word that comes to mind is: choreographed. It is so tight, and everyone fits so perfectly in their places—to their detriment. They feel so very passive.

Todd is the only one who seems to have a will. And it's all temper tantrums until he finds a secret passage and has to play that life-or-death game of draughts. And that, for me, was the best scene, because when Todd is sweating so that he can hardly see the game board, he at least feels real and alive. The others are like wisps or cut-out paper dolls or are just annoying in their unwillingness or inability to step out of line and assert themselves as characters who might topple the very carefully and ingeniously constructed plot.

Sigh.

Yes, The Accused is very much like a set of Russian nesting dolls, like this set in particular  ...

And, yes, I'll probably read another one of her damned books.