ZOMBIE

I think, and I've noticed that the past two e-mails are just between you and I, so I may have screwed up and hit the wrong reply button, so if you can figure out how to send this thread to everyone and you want to, then by all means do, but what I think is that this whole idea of compassion is key. That the reader has to have some compassion for the character. So that if you want to write a story where you follow Hitler around all day, you don't neccessarily have to make me like what Hitler is doing, and you as writer don't need the story to tacitly approve of Hitler, per se, but you need to show his velnerability, or something, so that the monster is frail, et cet.

There's a Joyce Carol Oates book called ZOMBIE. I'm not crazy about JCO, because it seems to me that she's a little too enthralled by writing about disfunction: like, we don't need a real character,because I've chosen a name - Shelly - and Shelly is an alcoholic rape victim with ovular cancer, alcoholic, rape victim, and ovular cancer,doing the work of characterization, and then for the plot, well, let's say she's going to her estranged father's funeral (her father, no doubt, being the guy who raped her) so that the story is more interested in disfunction than in people. However, this book ZOMBIE was about a sort of Dahmer like 19/20 yr. old man. He wanted to abduct a 14 yr. old boy and lobotomize him to create a sex slave. It was in 1st person. For a while it was good, I thought. I mean, it exposed the psychos velnerability, and it was sort of tender and also horrifying.

But ultimately it got boring, and then it became pointless, because nothing changed, nothing was learned, et cet, so it was just 200 pages of JCO up to her old tricks, ogling at disfunction. But that doesn't mean it couldn't be done. It just means JCO overdid it and came up short. I had the feeling that if the thing had been about half as long and had ended with the kid's arrest and confinement, or with him actually getting the sex slave and being utterly disappointed, the effect would have been altogether different.

[originally posted by Sam Ruddick]