Oct

6

Book ‘Em: Quiet, Unassuming, Ordinary…

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 6, 2008 |

Say the name “Jeffrey Dahmer” and most people get a cold chill down their spine. Say the name “Hannibal Lecter” and most people will smile, some will laugh, and a few might even suck their teeth. Because one’s real and one’s fictional there’s an easy kind of disconnection. We can romanticize Lecter, we can even admire him. Some of us may even put on a Lecter costume. What we miss in fictional serial killers, though, is how sick they are in reality. They’re often tormented individuals, but that’s no reason for sympathy. Writers like Thomas Harris or James Patterson can gloss over the torment, giving us instead fiendish supervillains, almost like comic book characters. Even Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, for all that it’s dark and brutal, doesn’t provide any psychological insight. Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie stands as a kind of  counter to these books.

The protagonist (the word “hero” just wouldn’t fit) is Quentin P., and the novel is in the form of his journal. Quentin, we learn, is a sex offender on probation. He’s also a serial killer. He’s managed to hide his murders very well, taking hitchhikers, even though he’s kept “trophies” from his kills. At least one critic called Oates’s novel “histrionic”, but she really skillfully balances the detachment that sociopaths must feel—and which makes them seem so charming—and the drive, the pathology that compels a serial killer. Quentin’s terrifying when he raves about how appealing one of his kills, the one he calls BIG GUY, is:

his skin a deep rich plum-black I was crazy to lick with my tongue & my teeth to gnaw. Even his toes, his big toes!—JUST CRAZY FOR HIM.

He reads about transorbital lobotomies in a textbook. This is a procedure that involves depressing the eye and inserting a sharp instrument into the front of the brain, eliminating the need for surgery. It’s a procedure that used to be common in psychiatry, making even the most hard-to-control psychotics slow and obedient. It was stopped some time in the 1950’s, but Quentin decides to revive it for his own purposes, to produce a subservient “zombie”.

He’s not a genius. He’s not a charming socialite who engages in witty conversation. He eats fast food, he drives a van, he works as a landlord. He is, to all outward appearances, normal, but this is what makes him so frightening. He could live down the street. He could be sitting next to you on the bus. And there are no fanatically dedicated and equally intelligent police officers with infinite resources in hot pursuit of him. In the genre of serial killer fiction, Oates’s novel is the equivalent of throwing us in the deep end while a lot of other writers have let us wade around the kiddie pool.


Comments

3 Comments so far

  1. Morgan on October 6, 2008 7:58 am

    Oates’ “We were the Mulvaneys” still remains one of my favorite books. She writes People so well that I remember having to put down the book several times because I got so angry at the characters. They were so believable.

    I have to confess some real surprise that she would venture into such a dark area, but I am really so intrigued by this book, which is now on my reading list.

  2. Christopher Waldrop on October 6, 2008 2:05 pm

    Some of her short stories (see the collections “Haunted” and “Heat”) get relatively dark, but even the darkest stories in those books look light compared to “Zombie”. That’s one of the things I like about Oates, though: I never know what to expect when I pick up one of her books.
    I forgot to mention that not many books give me nightmares, but this was definitely one of them.

  3. Andrea on October 6, 2008 8:31 pm

    Ah, was this the one you told me about? I need to add it to the wishlist before I forget again. It sounds really unsettling. It’s been a long time since a book gave me bad dreams.

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