One day an 11-year-old girl disappears. She was playing with friends from school. The crop is strengthened by her blood...
Marissa is an innocent girl, with hair the colour of corn-silk. She does not hold others in strange thrall, as some young women do, she obeys her parents, she does not stay late after school, lingering on her walk through the swaying heads of maize. She is the perfect sacrifice...
In Joyce Carol Oates' nightmarish world, teenaged girls are empowered by ritual killing, plastic surgeons perform bloodcurdling operations and birthdays rip families apart. Compulsively readable, told in razor-sharp prose, The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares is the brilliant new offspring of one of America's most terrifying imaginations.
Head of Zeus * Crime Fiction
01 Nov 2012 * 384pp * £16.99 * 9781908800220
REVIEWS
'Even within the wild and tangled menagerie that comprises our literary landscape, Joyce Carol Oates is a startling creature, possessed of a speed and talent that hints at the uncanny ... The Corn Maiden provides further confirmation of a unique writer's restless, preternatural brilliance'
Guardian
'For horror stories to be truly horrific, the reader has to care. Oates feels this deeply in her writing and delivers with style'
Independent on Sunday
'Oates has a talent for creating suspense and surprise, while apparently withholding nothing'
The Times
'Oates unerringly manages to unsettle the reader, preying deftly and mercilessly on our deepest anxieties'
Metro
Author
Joyce Carol Oates, literary icon, is the author of more than 70 books, including the bestselling novels We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honours 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.
Follow Joyce on @JoyceCarolOates
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