Triumph of the Spider Monkey

May 13, 2019
Originally published in 1976 and long out of print, this novella by Oates (Hazards of Time Travel) is a dark, disturbing trek through the mind of a psychotic killer. Bobbie Gotteson was found as an infant inside a New York City bus terminal footlocker. From that strange beginning, Gotteson’s life, as disjointedly relayed by him, is marked by one institution after another, including prison, while in between he fruitlessly scrambles as a struggling songwriting musician, actor, and gigolo—but he finds fame through murder, specifically with the hacking to death of nine stewardesses. One can never be sure of what is truth and what is delusion, leaving the reader lost within a story with nothing of substance to hold onto. This may have been Oates’s intention, but it makes for an unsatisfying and often distasteful experience. More coherent, but not much more satisfying, is the companion novella that tells of a survivor of Gotteson’s and the obsession of a young man hired to watch her. This one’s strictly for Oates fans.

June 1, 2019
A reprint of a minor novella first published in 1976 that's still a full-blown freak show of serial murder, psychological self-torment, and literal disintegration. Ever since he was plucked from inside a locker in a New York bus terminal shortly after his birth in 1944, Bobbie Gotteson, aka the Maniac, has shattered expectations, and not in a good way. He's traveled the country as a singer and songwriter, screen-tested (or maybe not: the putative studio denies it, and no footage has survived) for a movie role, and spent considerable time in prison. Now, put on trial for one of nine murders, more or less, he's accused of committing, he lets it all hang out, recalling his relationships with Melva, whose son he's been mistaken for; Danny Minx, his rapist and protector in stir; Baby Sharleen, who killed herself before she could testify against him; and a host of wraithlike women who drift in and out of his consciousness. "Consciousness," in fact, may be too definite a term for Bobbie's monologue, which persistently tramples on the distinctions between inside and outside, laughing and screaming, guitars and machetes, Jesus and Satan, first and third person, and the sanity Bobbie claims and the madness he acknowledges. A straight-faced footnote announces early on that "all remarks in this strange document are the Maniac's, even those he attributes to the 'court' and to other people." Oates (My Life as a Rat, 2019, etc.) withholds the gruesome details of Bobbie's butchery; the defiant confession of this fictional counterpart of Charles Manson is horrific, often carnivalesque, but never salacious or sensationalistic. As a bonus, this edition includes Love, Careless Love, a sequel of sorts that traces the doomed bond that forms between Dewalene, a young woman still traumatized by her encounter with Bobbie, and Jules, the disturbed young man hired for unknown reasons to keep an eye on her. What's most memorable about these twin blasts from the past is Oates' mastery of distinctly different flavors of nightmare, from the surreal to the flat-out demented.

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July 1, 2019
Oates' uncanny ability to channel the churning minds of psychopaths has been a key element of her unnerving fiction for decades. In this rediscovered portrait of a killer, first published in 1977, Oates gives voice to Bobbie Gotteson, abandoned at birth in a bus station locker and perpetually abused. Wiry, hirsute, and strong, this self-described spider monkey prefers men but, to his disgust, easily attracts women. He's getting by in Los Angeles as a musician while dreaming of becoming a movie star. All I wanted, he declares, was to be a face on a billboard! Instead, his hallucinogenic madness, so ferociously depicted, turns him homicidal, culminating in a massacre of four stewardesses. Boldly explicit, Oates' tale of criminal psychosis draws on the druggy decadence, greed, sexism, and violence of Hollywood in the Charles Manson-Roman Polanski era. Love, Careless Love, a novella also republished for the first time, extends the story as another on-the-precipice young man is hired to keep an eye on the one survivor of Gotteson's killing orgy. Here is more evidence of Oates' limitless, gruesome, and sympathetic imagination.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)