Rating: 
Summary: A good book from an author who usually delivers great books
Review: The Barrens puts other novels that masquerade as "compelling psycho-dramas" (think anything sold at the grocery store or on the mass paperback table at chain bookstores) to literary shame. For nearly two decades, JCO has been one of a handful of writers whose works I purchase in hardcover the day they become available. So, make no mistake, by any measure against other writers' work, this is a five-star read: suspenseful, harrowing, "true."But when I think about the body of work Oates has penned under the pseudonym "Rosamond Smith," I find that The Barrens falls short of the excellence she has achieved in this genre in, for example, Nemesis and Lives of the Twins. Also (and now perhaps I am being unfair by comparing her Smith work to her Oates work), I think JCO presents readers with a far more memorable psychopath in the groundbreaking (and chillingly realistic) Zombie, a slim volume that reminds us that serial killers are people, too.
Rating: 
Summary: Subtlety and a serial killer.
Review: The best of the Rosamond Smith / Oates mysteries. It strikes me as amazing that a writer as good (and exponentially prolific) as Oates can get better, but she does. Her recent forays, including The Barrens and Blonde, are so deliciously subtle in their presentation of characters' thought patterns and multiple levels of motives, that it leaves me staggering with respect for her skills. In her biography, some light is shed on her writing process. Oates seems to eat and breathe writing. She will pick up her manuscript in a taxi and continue scribbling exactly where she left off. The command she exerts over her craft shows in this book. She has mastered the form of paranoid mystery. Her characters ooze their deviant personalities. Even her hero in this book has a deep streak of manic perversity. If you want to know what goes through the mind of serial killers, read The Barrens and her previous book in this Smith series, Starbright will be with you soon. If you enjoy accessible literary excellence and riveted to your seat bones fiction, you can't go wrong with JCO.
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