Joyce Carol Oates likes gothics. The Accursed, originally written in 1984, is a powerful return to the sort of incendiary terrain she explored in the National Book Award-winning Them.
The novel is presented as having been written/compiled by a contemporary historian who tells us in an author's note that the tragic events he recounts took place in "accursed" Princeton, N.J. The story is a vast tapestry, its fictional chronicler thorough to a fault, a sign of Oates's own great effort in re-creating the "real" world of 1905. She sets the scene with references galore to furniture, flowers and herbs--along with historical figures like Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson and authors Jack London, Mark Twain and (a very favorably portrayed) Upton Sinclair.
The book opens with a young preacher who is deeply disappointed after a meeting with Wilson ("so keenly strung, he seemed at times to resemble a puppet jerked about by cruel, whimsical figures"), who doesn't share his anxiety about African Americans being hung in nearby Camden. Soon after, a frightening demon girl vanishes in a "paroxysm of flames," and the granddaughter of a former university president is lured out of the church during her own wedding--is a mysterious European count with strange eyes responsible?
Woven within this huge, Henry James-like Gothic is a latent, critically charged indictment of a society under a demonic urge: elitism, racism, prejudice. Immerse yourself in Oates's elaborate world and hang on for dear life. --Tom Lavoie, former publisher