SOURCE: "American Psycho," in The New York Times Book Review, October 8, 1995, p. 13.

Below, Marcus links the main character of Zombie with the recurrent theme of violence in Oates's fiction, faulting the novel's premise.

Divided into 57 mini-chapters, composed with typographical tics and oddities (many capitalized words, phrases and sentences; italics, ampersands and so forth), featuring crude and often pointless line drawings, Zombie is Joyce Carol Oates's effort to dramatize, in diarylike form, the psychotic, monstrous consciousness of a serial murderer. This creature is simultaneously intensely self-absorbed and extremely depersonalized and derealized. He speaks of himself indiscriminately in the first and third persons and uses his initials to refer to himself most of the time. Apart from his recurrent obsessions and fantasies, he is unable to retain either conscious inner stability or a reliably steady or coherent sense of the outside world.

Many of the details of Zombie owe much...