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A Tale of Suspense
by Joyce Carol Oates
Book Reviewed by:An exquisite, psychologically complex thriller about the opposing forces within the mind of one ambitious writer and the line between genius and madness.
Andrew J. Rush has achieved the kind of critical and commercial success most authors only dream about: his twenty-eight mystery novels have sold millions of copies in nearly thirty countries, and he has a top agent and publisher in New York. He also has a loving wife, three grown children, and is a well-regarded philanthropist in his small New Jersey town.
But Rush is hiding a dark secret. Under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades," he writes another string of novels - dark potboilers that are violent, lurid, even masochistic. These are novels that the refined, upstanding Andrew Rush wouldn't be seen reading, let alone writing. Until one day, his daughter comes across a Jack of Spades novel that he has carelessly left out and begins to ask questions. Meanwhile, Rush receives a court summons in the mail explaining that a local woman has accused him of plagiarizing her own self-published fiction. Rush's reputation, career, and family life all come under threat - and unbidden, in the back of his mind, the Jack of Spades starts thinking ever more evil thoughts.
1 The Ax
Out of the air, the ax. Somehow there was an ax and it rose and fell in a wild swath aimed at my head even as I tried to rise from my squatting position and lost my balance desperate to escape as my legs faltered beneath me and there came a hoarse pleading voice—"No! No please! No"—(was this my own choked voice, unrecognizable?)—as the ax-blade crashed and sank into the splintering desk beside my head missing my head by inches; by which time I'd fallen heavily onto the floor, a hard unyielding floor beneath the frayed Oriental carpet. I was scrambling to right myself, grabbing for the ax, desperate to seize the ax, in the blindness of desperation my hands flailing, and the voice (my own? my assailant's?) high-pitched and hardly human-sounding—"No! Nooo"—a fleeting glimpse of the assailant's stubby fingers and dead-white ropey-muscled arms inside the flimsy sleeves of nightwear, and a grunting cry as of triumph and ...
Reading (enjoying) Oates’ outstanding first person story about a famous author’s descent into madness made me wonder if there is such a thing as a bildungsroman for alter egos. A kind of coming of age tale about a person’s internal demon that spends a lifetime as a (mostly) harmless, toothless, nascent being that suddenly blossoms into full adulthood. What a delicious – to us horror fans – idea. I wish I had thought of it. Thankfully I didn’t have to. Oates thought of it first. And Jack of Spades is wonderful. Understated, but infinitely more powerful for it...continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Donna Chavez).
The consensus across a wide swath of authors and writing teachers is "write what you know." This advice may be even more important when writing a horror story. Sure, horror stories characteristically feature things that are not known, not normal, unfamiliar in the extreme. That's why they exist. People like to be scared by things out of the ordinary. But we can only be scared within the context of what is familiar; by the juxtaposition of what we know and what we don't know. A roller coaster ride is only scary because we know the height of the creaking scaffold, the speed at which the rickety, flimsy little car is hurtling your fragile body through space, and the imagined splat of hitting the ground after brakes fail and the car ...
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