Beasts (Otto Penzler Books)

by Joyce Oates (Author)

• New

  Paperback
  2008

  $19.59

  A young woman tumbles into a nightmare of decadent desire and corrupted innocence in a superb novella of suspense from National Book Award--winner Joyce Carol Oates. Art and arson, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence and pulp pornography, hero-worship and sexual debasement, totems and taboos mix and mutate into a startling, suspenseful tale of how a sunny New England college campus descends into a lurid nightmare. A small gem...Oates does not disappoint, nor does she waste a word. --The Washington Post Book World Oates often takes on sensational subject matter ...yet rarely has she done so with the churningly quiet understatement of ...Beasts. --Los Angeles Times A cunning fusion of Gothic romance and psychological horror story, and one of her best recent books. --Kirkus Reviews Oates's new novel is a slim one, but it packs a serious punch. --Associated Press Delicious ...Beasts is something of a jeu d'esprit noir...The novella length is exactly right for it. --The New York Review of Books

• Used

  Paperback
  2004

  $6.35

  A bright, talented junior at Catamount College in the druggy 1970s, Gillian Brauer strives to realise more than a poet's craft in her workshop with the charismatic, anti-establishment professor Andre Harrow. For Gillian has fallen in love - with Harrow, with his aesthetic sensibility and bohemian lifestyle, with his secluded cottage, with the mystique of his imposing, russet-haired French wife, Dorcas. A sculptress, Dorcas has outraged the campus and alumnae with the crude, primitive, larger than life-sized wooden totems that she has exhibited under the motto 'We are beasts and this is our consolation'. As if mesmerised, Gillian enters the rarefied world of the Harrows. She is special, even though she knows her classmates have preceded her here. She is helpless. She is powerful. And she will learn in full the meaning of Dorcas' provocative motto ...