Joyce Carol Oates – Zombie – Comment.

 

One of great talents of a novelist is to enter the mind of a character and reflect that character in a realistic manner. In JCO’s Zombie, the reader gains access into the mind of a sexually perverted psychotic, a serial killer, who is not too smart, but manages to get away with his gruesome activities. The narration bounces from first to second- and third person, including us into his insane fantasies, thoughts and opinions on society, and his goal for creating a zombie, that is a compliant sex slave. How the character goes about attaining this gruesome goal is quite disturbing. 

The protagonist calls himself Q-P, (Quentin) a thirty-one-year-old man with a penchant for young male victims. He is the son of a university professor and a stay-at-home mother who, all his life, protected him from the vagaries of life and himself. While reading the psychotic rantings of this character, I was reminded of the real-life serial killer, Jeffery Dalmer. Both attempted to achieve similar goals, and that is creating a compliant sex zombie for the obvious reasons.  

The most instructive section of the novel is chapter 13. It is here that Q-P discovers the scientific material on prefrontal lobotomies. Oates’ quotes from the medical literature, and as a reader, I was surprised and sickened, that this mental health treatment was ever practiced at all. After Q-P studies the material, he sets forth to practice this newfound knowledge on his victims.  

As the reader, it was difficult to move through the protagonist's graphic goals, thoughts and actions. What JCO is famous for, writing about the dark side of human nature with striking believability, that I had to constantly remind myself that this was a novel, and not the actual scribblings of a madman.  

What is startling is that there are human beings out there of the same variety of Q-P: perverted, always on the hunt for their prey, and hell-bent on fulfilling their disgusting fantasies.  

I’ve been a reader of JCO for some years now. It is her talent for the macabre, and subtle nuances of the mind that can shape a malignant soul, and coming away from her writing with unfamiliar disturbing feelings that I can never actually put my finger on. Perhaps it is the potential evil of our fellow human beings and their willingness to act on these feelings of pure evil that is unsettling.  

This novel was on my list for many years. If you want to take a deep dive into the mind of a perverted psychopath on a cloudy afternoon, and be done with it in one sitting, Zombie is the novella for you.