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.

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.)

March 15, 2015
A mystery writer slowly becomes subsumed by his dark alter ego in Oates' tale of literary madness.Andrew J. Rush has made a name for himself and more than a comfortable living as a successful mystery writer. He's published 28 novels, and an early review even called him "the gentleman's Stephen King." But behind the happily married family man with three grown children who's the favorite son of his small New Jersey town lies a secret, ultraviolent series of noir thrillers Rush writes under the pseudonym "Jack of Spades." No one-not even his doting wife, Irina-knows about Jack: Rush dashes the books off in secret and sends them to a separate agent and publisher. Despite its grisly content, the series sells modestly well. Rush's two worlds seem to coexist in parallel harmony until the day his daughter, Julia, finds a copy of Jack's A Kiss Before Killing in Rush's office and decides to read it. Soon after, Rush is hit with a bizarre plagiarism lawsuit from C.W. Haider, a local woman claiming he not only copied her ideas, but physically stole her work. In an enjoyable bit of metafiction, Oates (The Sacrifice, 2015, etc.) depicts Haider as particularly litigious when it comes to the literary set: she's sued Stephen King, John Updike, and Peter Straub, among others. While the mild-mannered Rush is merely indignant at being accused, Jack of Spades wants revenge, and so begins his slow descent into madness. With its homages to Poe, from "The Black Cat" to "The Tell-Tale Heart," and the horror masters Jack of Spades so admires, this latest unsettling and chilling thriller from Oates does not disappoint.

Starred review from 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.

December 1, 2014

A model family man and good citizen of his upscale New Jersey town, Andrew J. Rush has sold millions of copies worldwide of his 28 tastefully elegant mysteries. You'd think he wouldn't be caught dead reading the dark and lurid series penned by the pseudonymous Jack of Spades. But in fact he is the Jack of Spades, and when he's accused of plagiarism, upright Andrew starts thinking more like nasty Jack.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.