Zero Sum

March 1, 2023

In Zero Sum, the acclaimed Oates returns with high-stakes stories that include a woman confiding her fears about a stalker to the wrong person and teenage girls bent on punishing a sexual predator in their midst. Prepub Alert.

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Starred review from May 15, 2023
Oates (Blonde) exploits the relentless and unforgiving natures of her characters in this captivating collection. The “sulky-shy” philosophy student at the center of the title story obsesses over her married professor, whose unexpected betrayal drives the plot into bonkers territory. In the brilliant and harrowing “Mr. Stickum,” a gang of high school girls lures a series of would-be child abusers via anonymous ads, then capture and torture them. In “Take Me, I Am Free,” the briefest but no less haunting entry, a first-time mother rejects her role by continually placing her four-year-old daughter outside with the garbage for curb pickup, even when it’s raining. The longest story, “The Suicide,” enumerates a writer’s various plans for his death, each laid out with meticulous details. Oates closes out with a series of apocalyptic and speculative works, most notably “Marthe: A Referendum,” about the last surviving member of an artificially produced primate species who’s kept in an induced coma in 2169, waiting on the outcome of a vote on whether to keep her alive. Humanity in all its devilishness is on vibrant display in these short and potent flashes of life in bleak corners. Readers will be spellbound. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Assoc.

June 1, 2023
Pushing things to extremes is Oates' literary modus operandi, especially when it comes to the myriad betrayals of the mind and body. In her latest collection of macabre short stories, she extends the traditions of Edgar Allan Poe and Shirley Jackson in her own unique arias performed by characters assailed by mental illness and intent on destruction. A party at her philosophy professor's home turns an acutely anxious graduate student cruel in one of the many zero-sum (winner takes all) actions Oates orchestrates in grotesque tales of panic, rage, delusion, revenge, and self-destruction. Families are crucibles for madness and brutality as one fed-up mother puts her four-year-old daughter out with the trash and the pressure of caring for a newborn drives another mother over the edge. In "Mr. Stickum," schoolgirls horrified by rumors of "Pop-Up Parties" featuring "child sex slaves" build a fiendish trap for their town's secret predators. Oates is fascinated by how the "lurid-freakish" becomes normal both in households and, more apocalyptically, in society at-large as climate change begins to decimate earthly life. High-pitched, unnerving, and incisive.

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June 1, 2023
Twelve new stories from a prolific master of the short form. In Oates' new collection, the zero-sum game so often at work in relationships is explored with exhaustive care. These relationships take varied forms. Sometimes characters struggle with power dynamics. In "Lovesick," E___ seeks out her former lover to tell him she is being threatened by an anonymous caller, a fact that seems to shock and gratify him in equal turns. In other stories, the relationships are well worn, long settled in their more-or-less predictable gender roles, which have become insufficient to clothe the hostilities that exist at their cores. The lengthy central story, "The Suicide," stuns with the relentless misogyny of the main character, a brilliant writer consumed by suicidal ideation, who's disgusted by the "bottomless tar pit of [his wife's] compassion" even as he reveals that this slavish compassion is the only emotion he has allowed her to express. Indeed, in many of the stories, the power that is transferred between characters centers around a perversion of the expression of female nurture. In "The Cold," a mother of young children who has suffered a recent miscarriage is prevented from recovery by the presence of frigid breezes that creep up behind her like "an unwanted caress." As bound as these characters are by their knotted relationships, they are even more bound by the taut, efficient sentences that throttle any hope a character might have of resolving their intractable dilemmas. Indeed, throughout the collection, Oates' vicious incisiveness enacts a more brutal persecution than any of the cruelties the characters inflict upon each other--ultimately leaving little room for change in any direction other than the downward spiral. While this makes for a heady reading experience, it also creates a certain thinness to the collection as a whole that results in individual stories feeling like experiments with a theme rather than explorations of the unlikely, but still human, extremes to which the characters are forced. Boldly cruel and consummately styled, these tales never fail to provoke if not always to satisfy.

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