The Triumph of the Spider Monkey

by Joyce Carol Oates

Overview

New York Times–bestselling author

Unavailable for 40 years, this seminal crime novel of madness and murder is a powerful trip into the mind of a maniac—and features a never-before-seen companion novella.

“Oates’ tale of criminal psychosis draws on the druggy decadence, greed, sexism, and violence of Hollywood in the Charles Manson-Roman Polanski era.” —Booklist

Abandoned as a baby in a bus station locker—shuttled from one abusive foster home and detention center to another—Bobbie Gotteson grew up angry, hurting, damaged. His hunger to succeed as a musician brought him across the country to Hollywood, but along with it came his seething rage, his paranoid delusions, and his capacity for acts of shocking violence.

Unavailable for 40 years, The Triumph of the Spider Monkey is an eloquent, terrifying, heartbreaking exploration of madness by one of the most acclaimed authors of the past century. This definitive edition for the first time pairs the original novel with a never-before-collected companion novella by Joyce Carol Oates—unseen since its sole publication in a literary journal nearly half a century ago—which examines the impact of Gotteson’s killing spree on a woman who survived it, as seen through the eyes of the troubled young man hired by a private detective to surveil her...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781785657726
Publisher:	Titan
Publication date:	07/16/2019
Series:	Hard Case Crime
Sold by:	Penguin Random House Publisher Services
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	31,821
File size:	814 KB

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

Hometown:

Princeton, New Jersey

Date of Birth:

June 16, 1938

Place of Birth:

Lockport, New York

Education:

B.A., Syracuse University, 1960; M.A., University of Wisconsin, 1961

Editorial Reviews

05/13/2019

Originally published in 1976 and long out of print, this novella by Oates (Hazards of Time Travel) is a dark, disturbing trek through the mind of a psychotic killer. Bobbie Gotteson was found as an infant inside a New York City bus terminal footlocker. From that strange beginning, Gotteson’s life, as disjointedly relayed by him, is marked by one institution after another, including prison, while in between he fruitlessly scrambles as a struggling songwriting musician, actor, and gigolo—but he finds fame through murder, specifically with the hacking to death of nine stewardesses. One can never be sure of what is truth and what is delusion, leaving the reader lost within a story with nothing of substance to hold onto. This may have been Oates’s intention, but it makes for an unsatisfying and often distasteful experience. More coherent, but not much more satisfying, is the companion novella that tells of a survivor of Gotteson’s and the obsession of a young man hired to watch her. This one’s strictly for Oates fans. (July)

Publishers Weekly

. . . a full-blown freak show of serial murder, psychological self-torment, and literal disintegration.”
—Kirkus Review

“Boldly explicit, Oates’ tale of criminal psychosis draws on the druggy decadence, greed, sexism, and violence of Hollywood in the Charles Manson-Roman Polanski era.”
—Booklist

“Oates digs so deeply into the psyche of the murderous personality that it makes for rough reading in parts, but the subject matter is not and should not be sacrificed on the altar of the reader’s comfort zone.”
—BookReporter

“If you’re a fan of psychological suspense novels, The Triumph of the Spider Monkey will leave you sleeping with the lights on for a few nights.”
—George Kelley

“[The Triumph of the Spider Monkey] once again displays [Oates'] enviable skill, creativity, and versatility.”
—Mystery Scene Magazine

From the Publisher

2019-05-12
A reprint of a minor novella first published in 1976 that's still a full-blown freak show of serial murder, psychological self-torment, and literal disintegration.

Ever since he was plucked from inside a locker in a New York bus terminal shortly after his birth in 1944, Bobbie Gotteson, aka the Maniac, has shattered expectations, and not in a good way. He's traveled the country as a singer and songwriter, screen-tested (or maybe not: the putative studio denies it, and no footage has survived) for a movie role, and spent considerable time in prison. Now, put on trial for one of nine murders, more or less, he's accused of committing, he lets it all hang out, recalling his relationships with Melva, whose son he's been mistaken for; Danny Minx, his rapist and protector in stir; Baby Sharleen, who killed herself before she could testify against him; and a host of wraithlike women who drift in and out of his consciousness. "Consciousness," in fact, may be too definite a term for Bobbie's monologue, which persistently tramples on the distinctions between inside and outside, laughing and screaming, guitars and machetes, Jesus and Satan, first and third person, and the sanity Bobbie claims and the madness he acknowledges. A straight-faced footnote announces early on that "all remarks in this strange document are the Maniac's, even those he attributes to the ‘court' and to other people." Oates (My Life as a Rat, 2019, etc.) withholds the gruesome details of Bobbie's butchery; the defiant confession of this fictional counterpart of Charles Manson is horrific, often carnivalesque, but never salacious or sensationalistic. As a bonus, this edition includes Love, Careless Love, a sequel of sorts that traces the doomed bond that forms between Dewalene, a young woman still traumatized by her encounter with Bobbie, and Jules, the disturbed young man hired for unknown reasons to keep an eye on her.

What's most memorable about these twin blasts from the past is Oates' mastery of distinctly different flavors of nightmare, from the surreal to the flat-out demented.

Kirkus Reviews