Book Report

I puIled an all-nighter last night. Well, not totally. I went to bed about 2 in the morning. I couldn’t put the book down. I just kept turning the pages wanting to know what was happening, rushing to follow wherever the story was taking me.

And it was taking me down a terrible dark hole but I had to keep reading. Horrible things were happening. Abuse, betrayal, murder, abandonment in some dark, depressing and decaying town in the middle of nowhere. And all written in an incredibly intense and feverish but, at the same time, tightly controlled style. A truly virtuoso performance by the author.

The book is “Little Bird of Heaven” by Joyce Carol Oates. I’ve only read one other novel by her although she’s a very prolific novelist. The list of her published novels at the front of the book is amazingly long.

I wonder if she wrote the novel in the same white heat in which I read it. Was she exhausted or exhilarated after finishing it? Was she glad to be done with this tragic story, its disturbing characters or sorry to let it all go?