Zombie

Quentin P. is thirty one, on probation for a molestation charge his family has agreed to consider a misunderstanding, living in his grandmother's Michigan house as caretaker, taking a community college course, checking in with his parole officer, and keeping, in the notebook that is this novel, the ledger of his actual project: the manufacture, by transorbital lobotomy performed with an ice pick on abducted young men, of a zombie, a creature with no will who will be entirely, permanently his.

Oates commits to the voice absolutely. Quentin narrates in his own idiom, flat, self pitying, decorated with childish black humor, block capitals and hand drawn diagrams reproduced on the page, his experiments recounted with the aggrieved patience of a hobbyist whose materials keep failing him, the dead catalogued by nicknames because their names never registered. Around the horror runs the satire, which is the book's second blade: Quentin is white, a professor's son, and the novel documents with terrible economy how family shame, institutional laziness and racial deference keep sliding him back into circulation, his probation officer charmed, his father writing checks, the neighbors seeing a polite handyman.

It is very short, technically dazzling and almost unbearable, closer to a poison capsule than a novel, and there is no exit built into it: the reader who wants a detective closing in or a survivor's testimony has picked up the wrong book on purpose.

Around one hundred and eighty pages.

Best for readers who can take the serial killer novel from all the way inside, with no investigator, no rescue and no relief, the era's psycho thriller stripped to its engine.