Overview

"In this gripping psychological thriller, Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times best-selling author and one of the most versatile and original voices in contemporary American fiction, delivers a startling, complex tale of a serial killer and the people that his ghastly crimes touch,and transform. People like Matt McBride. Matt was barely out of junior high when the mutilated body of the first victim,a popular, pretty teenager,was uncovered in the desolate New Jersey Pine Barrens. Although he had hardly known the girl, Matt has long felt guilty at not having been able somehow to prevent the atrocity. Now another attractive young woman has disappeared, and Matt knew this victim, too. Just possibly he knew her more intimately than he is prepared to admit. By degrees Matt becomes obsessed with a guilt he can neither comprehend nor assuage. His seemingly happy marriage begins to deteriorate, while his increasingly erratic behaviour heightens police suspicions. It also draws official attention away from an artist,a man of limited talent but of fierce, demented vision,who signs his work Name Unknown. Under the spell of the missing woman, Matt follows a path that leads him out of the maze of tortured memory to a confrontation with not only the baleful Name Unknown but also his own long-unacknowledged self. The outcome is shattering. With ""murder as an art and the serial killer as an artist,"" National Book Award-winner Joyce Carol Oates shows ""how a murderer's savage creations ...transform a man's life."",Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times ""Oates fans may judge [The Barrens] the best Smith novel yet."",Boston Herald"

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Joyce Carol Oates was born in New York in 1938. She has written many novels and numerous collections of stories, poetry and plays. Oates is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the 2019 Jerusalem Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and has been nominated several times for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national best sellers We Were the Mulvaneys; Blonde; and the New York Times best seller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. In 2020 she was awarded the Cino Del Duca World Prize for Literature. She is currently the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University.

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