Zombie

I HATED this book! It was excellently written and it did what it was supposed to do scared the crap out of me. This is a character study of a social deviant. I don't want to spoil this for anyone who reads it, so I won't give away the ending, but definitely not something you read while lying on the beach catching your tan. No escapism here. You come face to face with the evil and cunning of the sociopathic and psychotic mind. Be prepared to bathe in Dettol and then curl up in bed under the cover [...]

This fairly wretched novel is JCO shooting dead boys in a barrel. I dunno, it seems like taking the easy option to me - you takes your Jeffrey Dahmer (you remember him, he was a lonely boy who wanted a gay sex pet to do his every bidding, and he read a book on brain surgery and he thought that if you drilled the right hole in a man's head it would stop him from realising you were a dangerous psycho and leaving, so he practised on a few guys who unfortunately like died which was not Jeffrey's int [...]

A ruthless, blindingly-ugly, revealing character study of a sexual psychopath.Joyce Carol Oates, I now officially forgive you for the tedium of We Were the Mulvaneys. This book was all that Mulvaneys was NOT - brilliantly written, brave, and (maybe most importantly) brief.It became clear to me after reading this book that Quentin P is based at least loosely on real life serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, which is interesting from a historical perspective. But I enjoyed reading this being clueless abo [...]

Damn, Joyce, I didn't know you rolled like that.

Short, dark, and very scary - like a tipsy 2am Uber ride home that instead drags you into macabre neighborhoods and makes you question exactly what your ultimate payment will be (and maybe whether somebody slipped a touch of rohypnol in your margarita). Things are OFF. Way OFF.So. You up for being freaked out and mesmerized for 200 pages?? Do yourself a favor and do NOT read the publisher's blurb or other reviews. I walked into this book entirely blind and assumed because of the title that I'd s [...]

How to Avoid Being BourgeoisThis is not terrifying or "monstrous," and it is not a shocking revelation. It does not take us "into the mind of a serial killer." It is not "harrowing," and it's not "disturbing." It is a strained and earnest attempt to imagine the kind of life that would decisively overturn bourgeois values. But it doesn't do that, because the imagining of the Other is already part of middle-class American life. Even the most surprising lines pale as soon as they're read, because i [...]

I generally like Oates's dark fiction (her short stories are particularly good), but I chose not to finish this one. I'd meant to read Zombie for a long time, and was disappointed to find it utterly repulsive when I finally got around to it . . . but not in the way you might imagine.I thought I knew what I was getting into when I picked up a book told from the POV of a sexually depraved serial killer dabbling in icepick lobotomies. (Browse my library and you'll see it takes a lot more than that [...]

Amantes de los asesinos y psicopatas, esta es su novela. Ya que conocerás a Quentin y su obsesión por convertirse en el amo de un zombie que le cumpla todos sus deseos carnales, pero para alcanzarlo deben existir muchos muertos. ¿Para que leer zombi ?1. Por que es un ejercicio narrativo interesante, ya que la autora nos pone en la piel y en la mente de nuestro psicópata y como este justifica sus acciones. Es una mezcla entre horror psiquiatra, humor negro y rarezas familiares. 2. El protagon [...]

It would be wrong to say I enjoyed this one--I didn't. But then again, I wasn't supposed to. Joyce Carol Oates has created a novel so eerie and unnerving that the words "enjoyment," "escapism," and "entertaining" are totally inapplicable. But it is a masterfully written tale with the kind of skillfulness you'd expect from Oates, who is a phenomenal writer. I'm not going to write much more about this because I've got other books waiting for me tonight, but what I will say is that you should only [...]

An unpleasant book, taking you, with absolute lack of Hanniballian romance, into the petty, insignificant mind of a serial killer. The main character only wants to dominate pretty men; he's as cheap and tiresome and disorganized and lame as a middle-aged guy leering at you in a Denny's. To destroy the romance of serial killing: it's like that scene in Sandman where Morpheus takes away the illusions at the "Cereal Convention," only the illusion is actually taken away, not handwaved as one of Morp [...]

Ha sido una lectura difícil. Era como estar en un rincón de la habitación viendo como sucedía todo. Se me contraía todo el cuerpo en las escenas desagradables, lo que es prácticamente todo el tiempo, y a veces me daban ganas de cerrar los ojos como si en lugar de leyendo estuviera viendo una película.Siempre me han intrigado las lecturas narradas desde el punto de vista de una persona con alguna enfermedad mental. Adentrarme en la cabeza y descubrir la forma de pensar de una persona así, [...]

Joyce Carol Oates snared my attention in her old short story, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? In her novel, Zombie, (1995), she writes in a first person narrative of a psychopath who has a crush on various youthful men, and uses devilish means to capture them and use them as sex slaves. In turns, quizzically funny and nasty, the writings are merely scribbles and with various doodles in the borders that take on sinister meanings as you read the story. As a reader I am a little put off [...]

Read more (cjlistro/2012/05/) Anyone who knows me well knows that I have a bit of an obsession with serial killers. So after a conversation about Jeffrey Dahmer the other day (yes, the glamorous life of a psych grad student), I recalled a former lit professor having mentioned this evilly wonderful novel by Joyce Carol Oates, one of the underappreciated literary greats. The novel’s protagonist happens to be based heavily on Dahmer, who had similar zombie-making inclinations. I read it in about [...]

March 8th, 2015 IM DONE FINALLYYYYY1.5 stars.I just can't with this book. It just left me rubbing my eyes wanting to get rid of all the disturbing imagery. I thought I knew what I was getting myself into but not really. Besides the way it was written annoyed me ("and" becoming "&"), the subject matter itself is so surreal. Like you seriously grabbed a serial pedo killer and reached into his/her brain. I don't think I'll ever look at a killer the same way ever again.cially thanks to Quentin [...]

It made me more uncomfortable than anything I've read recently. The first person narration is unnervingly believable; it was not what I might have imagined a serial killer's voice to be, but it is now. A lot of reviewers seem to think that great books cannot be this upsetting. While I disagree with that premise and do consider this a very good piece of writing, I can't give it stars. It just isn't shiny.**I have since given it stars. Distance helped me heal.

Very disturbing, creepy story told from the pov of a psychopath. I've read alot of horror/thrillers and little makes me flinch but a few scenes in this made me cringe! Unusual writing style which added to the story. My first by Joyce Carol Oates and not really what I was expecting and in a good way I disliked it :-) The ending was a bit abrupt.

Going beyond the psyche of "the monster," Joyce Carol Oates invites herself into the mind of a murderer, thus making him downright human again. A wholly disturbed and unpleasant human, but unmistakably vulnerably sentient nonetheless.Quentin P. is like any one of us in that sense, at least.Zombie is a diary of sorts. The owner/writer of this diary is Quentin P. (who frequently refers to himself by initials alone, and to others solely by initials or - in special cases - cutesy nicknames). Those n [...]

This book came to mind today as I was browsing a discussion thread titled, "Do you have to like the narrator to enjoy the book?" Quentin, the decidedly unlikeable narrator of Oates' 1995 novel Zombie, kidnaps young men, holds them captive in his house, and then applies an icepick to their brains in his quest to create the perfect zombie love slave. He isn't particularly adept with the pick. Young men die horribly, and there is a great deal of ugly, violent rape and worse. Quentin also seems to l [...]

Increíble la capacidad de Oates para penetrar en una mente y contar la historia sin perder un ápice de la calidad que le caracterizaentremontonesdelibros

I am afraid of Joyce Carol Oates. How did she ever think to write such a disturbing story? It's as if we were watching the most frightening Criminal Minds episode exclusively from the point of view of the obviously deranged stalker/serial killer/rapist and could not turn off the television. I am still shivering. And yet, I really liked this book.

Not the JCO I remember. Meet Quentin: a violent serial-rapist/killer and pedophile. Oates places the reader inside the mind of a social deviant, but succeeds only insofar as she shocks. These moments are daring enough to outweigh sudden, dramatic shifts in tone and style, which the narrative occasionally suffers from—switching from pedantic, broken English to deep, allegorical, highly poetic aphorism. The latter would feel more compelling (and authentic) if it didn't arrive at such odds with t [...]

This was a real page-turner for me, a single afternoon read. It's written in a diary style from the point of view of a very believable childlike predator. I read a lot of true-crime and consider myself well-versed in criminal psychology, and I thought that the restraint practiced by the author in terms of only recording things from the sophomoric emotional state of a stunted and sad murderer was remarkable. Well-executed work that I will enjoy using as a basis for the author's other creations.Fa [...]

This is perhaps as disturbing as it gets, while still actually being published by a publisher. Zombie is somewhat reminiscent of The Collector both in regards to the high quality quirky writing and the theme, but without the pretense of civilization and decency. The psycho point of view is just so Perfect! And having just read one other Oates book before I really had no idea she was an author capable of writing something like this.

Lol the title cleverly references how the author wrote this on autopilot.

Eh. Decent read told from the perspective of a serial killer. Author uses caps a lot to underscore certain points or words, gets annoying after awhile.

Μου το είχε προτείνει ο φίλος Γιώργος και με το που ξαναβγήκε στην κυκλοφορία, το πήρα. Ανάμεικτες εντυπώσεις. Ενώ ξεκινά καλά και περιμένεις να μπει δυνατά η σπλατερια και η σφαγή, διαπιστώνεις ότι στο πάει γύρω γύρω. Παρόλα αυτά, έχει ωραίο κλίμα και μοιάζει σαν ένας σύγχρο [...]

I feel like I need to take a shower after finishing this book. Or several showers.Joyce Carol Oates seems to really like to do this thing in her work where she fictionalizes big news stories or real people's lives and works them into a novel. Some of her most popular and acclaimed books fall into this category, like Black Water and Blonde. In Zombie, we are introduced to Quentin P an obvious stand-in for serial killer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, this short novel's narrator who is obsessed with [...]

This book made me angry. I understand that Joyce Carol Oates writes books that make you feel like you need a shower, and I was cool with that. I expected it even. What I didn't expect was for this to be written like drivel. An excerpt."Twelve years old & in seventh grade & now I was wearing glasses & long-armed & skinny & hair sprouting under my arms & at my groin & their eyes sliding onto me & even the teachers & in gym class I refused to go through the showe [...]

Rating: 3.5 of 5Sad, disgusting, horrific: exactly what one would imagine the mind of a serial killer to be. I didn't realize beforehand that Zombie was inspired by Jeffrey Dahmer, but I figured it out after Quentin P. shared his fantasy about the creation of a living zombie. The narrative was entirely stream of consciousness from Quentin's perspective, which was super creepy, and it definitely felt like I was reading a real journal. Oates fully immersed herself in the mindset of a killer, so mu [...]

Tough read.For such a short book this took a bit to read as I could only read it in parcels.It is not because it is not a "good" book, it is. The book is simply a rough ride.Stark, bleak, devoid of life. You will feel empty after reading this empty as Q_P. Herein lies the genius of the novel.Quentin (Q_P) is a serial killer. I am not giving anything away by telling you this. It is presented from the start.You are invited into the mind of this monster. What you will find there isch of nothing.The [...]