A vein of feminist horror runs through Joyce Carol Oates’s latest collection ... While the final two, post-apocalyptic stories tread familiar ground, the overall trajectory feels satisfying, with the book’s zero-sum games advancing to an existential battle between humanity and the destructive forces it has unleashed.
Oates overproduces and experiments, so it’s no surprise that Zero-Sum is patchy ... As a writer, Oates has her predilections and obsessions, but she rarely repeats herself. Indeed, one of the pleasures of her stories is that in their variety (science fiction, horror, character study, family drama) you never know where she’ll take you next.
Brilliant ... A self-described formalist, inveterately inventive and experimental, Oates presses the zero-sum principle to extremes in a volume bringing together philosophical narratives, psychological studies, science fiction, dystopia, horror, dark comedy and suspenseful mystery. No single genre satisfies her creative energies and restless imagination, with the result that reading these tales is a startling and disturbing adventure. Having finished one variation on the theme, the reader never knows what form the next will take.
Macabre ... 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.
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.
Captivating ... Humanity in all its devilishness is on vibrant display in these short and potent flashes of life in bleak corners. Readers will be spellbound.
