A writer's secret pseudonymous identity becomes a conduit for his murderous dark side in Oates's sleek and suspenseful excursion into the literary macabre. For years refined crime novelist Andrew J. Rush-known to his audience as "the gentleman's Stephen King"-has moonlighted as Jack of Spades, an author of violent pulp potboilers. When an unhinged reader brings a ludicrous lawsuit against him for literary theft, Andrew snaps. Motivated by what Poe called "the imp of the perverse"-a quotation from the Poe story of that name serves as the book's epigraph-he begins acting increasingly like a character in one of his alter ego's nasty novels. Oates (High Crime Area) has endowed her first-person narrator with the slightly affected speaking style and overconfidence of one of Poe's monomaniacal protagonists. Although she nods to a number of Poe's classic tales-especially "The Black Cat" and "William Wilson"-the story's modern spin is entirely of her own clever invention. Readers are sure to be gripped and unsettled by her depiction of a seemingly mild-mannered character whose psychopathology simmers frighteningly close to the surface. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
