“Enthralling. . . . Harrowing. . . . Oates scores aggressively with this novel.” - Chicago Tribune
“Joyce Carol Oates takes the worst nightmares and runs with them. . . . Impressive.” - San Francisco Examiner
What gives this novel its awesome power is Oates’s ability to convice us that Quentin might be anyone: a casual acquaintance, a friend, or a brother. Compulsively readable and impossible to forget, this should both win the prolific Oates new fans and satisfy her longtime readers. - Library Journal
Oates repeatedly exhibits the unwavering ability to depict the shadowy, at times malignant, aspects of human nature. Her latest endeavor is perhaps her most chilling novel to date, a diary with the eerie familiarity of yesterday’s headlines, written by a sexually obsessed serial killer... With striking parallels to published reports of Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes, it is difficult not to conjure up that killer’s image or to imagine his very thoughts and the rituals portrayed in the press as being perpetrated by him. Still, Oates compels the reader onward to the very last page of a horrifying, revelatory work of fiction. - Booklist