A review by litwrite
The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates
3.0
The following conversation took place with my husband when I was about 2/3rds of the way through The Accursed:
"What are you reading now?"
"It's a gothic book by Joyce Carol Oates."
"Well, what happens in it?"
"Well, this one girl is about to get married and she leaves her husband at the altar and is kidnapped and gangraped by the devil and his friends and gives birth to a creepy devil baby. Also, her brother throws himself off a boat into the the seas of the north pole, her cousin turns into a statue, another woman in the same community gets turned into a vampire, and a succubus preys on all the fat old rich dudes."
"So it's a horror novel then?"
"Not really because all the characters in it are real people, like Woodrow Wilson who was a president of the USA, and Upton Sinclair who is a famous American author."
"Oh... wow that sounds really weird."
The Accursed really is such a strange, ambitious novel that's difficult to review and even more impossible to categorize, which serves as somewhat a conundrum for me because I usually like to frame a lot of my reviews with comparisons to other materials I've read or watched but this is so unlike anything else that I really can't compare it to anything else I've read.
Looking through the goodreads reviews for The Accursed, it's obvious that this is a novel of very polarizing opinions - you either love this, or you hate this. It's a critic's darling, with Stephen King calling it " the world's first postmodern gothic novel", and yet it seems entirely too strange for the unwashed plebes such as me.
In the end, I didn't love nor hate this novel but certainly it gave me a lot to think about which I always admire in a book. I've read a lot of Oates before, she is incredibly prolific and writes such a broad range of books but this is definitely her most unique novel that I've read. One of the problem points for me lies not with the novel itself but with the fact that, not being American, I don't really know a lot about American history and the merging of real life American figures with an over the top Gothic story line probably didn't affect me as much as someone who grew up in the old US of A and has more than a passing familiarity with Woodrow Wilson et al.
I do think the novel was a tad overlong, but the grandiose verbosity is par for the course with the Gothic tradition and Oates mimics it well. I'm not sure that I'd really recommend this to the casual reader but those who are fond of Gothic novels and won't mind the archaic writing style might enjoy.
"What are you reading now?"
"It's a gothic book by Joyce Carol Oates."
"Well, what happens in it?"
Spoiler
"Well, this one girl is about to get married and she leaves her husband at the altar and is kidnapped and gangraped by the devil and his friends and gives birth to a creepy devil baby. Also, her brother throws himself off a boat into the the seas of the north pole, her cousin turns into a statue, another woman in the same community gets turned into a vampire, and a succubus preys on all the fat old rich dudes."
"So it's a horror novel then?"
"Not really because all the characters in it are real people, like Woodrow Wilson who was a president of the USA, and Upton Sinclair who is a famous American author."
"Oh... wow that sounds really weird."
The Accursed really is such a strange, ambitious novel that's difficult to review and even more impossible to categorize, which serves as somewhat a conundrum for me because I usually like to frame a lot of my reviews with comparisons to other materials I've read or watched but this is so unlike anything else that I really can't compare it to anything else I've read.
Looking through the goodreads reviews for The Accursed, it's obvious that this is a novel of very polarizing opinions - you either love this, or you hate this. It's a critic's darling, with Stephen King calling it " the world's first postmodern gothic novel", and yet it seems entirely too strange for the unwashed plebes such as me.
In the end, I didn't love nor hate this novel but certainly it gave me a lot to think about which I always admire in a book. I've read a lot of Oates before, she is incredibly prolific and writes such a broad range of books but this is definitely her most unique novel that I've read. One of the problem points for me lies not with the novel itself but with the fact that, not being American, I don't really know a lot about American history and the merging of real life American figures with an over the top Gothic story line probably didn't affect me as much as someone who grew up in the old US of A and has more than a passing familiarity with Woodrow Wilson et al.
I do think the novel was a tad overlong, but the grandiose verbosity is par for the course with the Gothic tradition and Oates mimics it well. I'm not sure that I'd really recommend this to the casual reader but those who are fond of Gothic novels and won't mind the archaic writing style might enjoy.