Jack of Spades

Starred review from March 23, 2015
A writer’s secret pseudonymous identity becomes a conduit for his murderous dark side in Oates’s sleek and suspenseful excursion into the literary macabre. For years refined crime novelist Andrew J. Rush—known to his audience as “the gentleman’s Stephen King”—has moonlighted as Jack of Spades, an author of violent pulp potboilers. When an unhinged reader brings a ludicrous lawsuit against him for literary theft, Andrew snaps. Motivated by what Poe called “the imp of the perverse”—a quotation from the Poe story of that name serves as the book’s epigraph—he begins acting increasingly like a character in one of his alter ego’s nasty novels. Oates (High Crime Area) has endowed her first-person narrator with the slightly affected speaking style and overconfidence of one of Poe’s monomaniacal protagonists. Although she nods to a number of Poe’s classic tales—especially “The Black Cat” and “William Wilson”—the story’s modern spin is entirely of her own clever invention. Readers are sure to be gripped and unsettled by her depiction of a seemingly mild-mannered character whose psychopathology simmers frighteningly close to the surface. Agent: Warren Frazier, John Hawkins & Associates.

June 29, 2015
Joe Barrett has a great time bringing to life this twisted tale of a man’s fall into madness and murder. Andrew J. Rush is a celebrated literary novelist, with enough critical accolades and money to satisfy any author. It would appear that Rush reigns happily atop the elusive mountain of publishing success, but he has a secret. Under the pseudonym Jack of Spades, he writes a series of ultraviolent pulp novels that are unrivaled in their depictions of visceral depravity. But family drama, professional jealousy, and accusations of plagiarism lead Rush to hear the strident, demanding voice of Jack, and that voice is pushing him down a dark, deadly path in his own life. Reader Barrett sets just the right tone with this first-person page-turner. He gives Rush a perfectly calm sense of reasonableness, but at the same time his reading nicely conveys the fragility of the character’s sanity as it begins to slowly crack and break. It is a well-textured performance that pulls the listener in and never lets go. A Grove/Atlantic/Mysterious hardcover.

April 1, 2015

Oates (We Were The Mulvaneys; Blonde) has written a great psychological noir novel, which also serves as a homage to Stephen King (once shunned but now embraced by the literary establishment). Andrew J. Rush, a seemingly mild-mannered and irritatingly self-absorbed and smug author of mainstream thriller fiction, has begun to write (in a partially fugue state) disturbing and violent novels under the Jack of Spades pseudonym. But when Andrew is accused of plagiarism and his daughter begins to ask questions about Jack of Spades, his carefully compartmentalized life begins to unravel. VERDICT As this tour de force reveals, Oates is a master of bleak literary fiction and its (sometimes) poor relation, crime/noir fiction. Examining and delineating insanity, obsession, paranoia, alcoholism, manipulation, and murder, not to mention book collecting and writer's block, this tale of suspense makes for another high-caliber Oatesian outing, displaying flair, noir sophistication, and King-like flourishes. [See Prepub Alert, 11/24/14.]--Seamus Scanlon, Ctr. for WorkerEducation, CUNY

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2015
Andrew J. Rush is a successful crime fiction writer and long-married father of three grown children who lives with discipline and dignity on a lovely New Jersey estate in a beautifully appointed old mansion that includes a secret cellar library. Naturally, given that this is a deft and wily psychological thriller by the fathomlessly imaginative Oates (Daddy Love, 2013), Rush has something to hide. In addition to carefully and reliably crafting his bestselling, mannerly mysteries, he has also been furiously scribbling, in clandestine, late-night, alcohol-stoked marathons, poisonously angry, wretchedly twisted, and violent noir published under the pseudonym, Jack of Spades. Andrew is already struggling to maintain this assiduously compartmentalized life when he is summoned to court to face an inexplicable charge of plagiarism. Surely his accuser, a wealthy recluse who has also sued Stephen King, is a nut case, so why is Andrew freaking out? In this lashed-to-your-seat tale of mental disintegration, Oates conducts a chilling anatomy of a literary genius run dangerously amok and a cruelly parasitic marriage while also paying witty homage to literary horror. Delectably sharp, shivery fun.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)