A brilliant young philosophy student bent on seducing her famous philosopher-mentor finds herself outmaneuvered; diabolically clever high school girls wreak a particularly apt sort of vengeance on sexual predators in their community; a man returns from the dead to haunt his grieving wife; a young mother finds herself captivated by her own motherhood. In the collection's longest story, a much-praised writer cruelly experiments with "drafts" of his own suicide. In these powerfully wrought stories that hold a mirror up to our time, Joyce Carol Oates has created a world of erotic obsession, thwarted idealism, and ever-shifting identities.
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.
