Joyce Carol Oates - Soul/Mate

Dust Jacket Blurb

Rosamond Smith made a more than promising debut as a suspense novelist with Lives of the Twins. Now she establishes herself with one of the most shattering psychothrillers in recent years, a novel that shows at every riveting, unexpected turn the hand of a master.

We know almost at once that Colin Asch, who has come to an elegant and very respectable Boston suburb to stay with his aunt and uncle, is a killer. We see him kill with fiendish efficiency and see how easily he escapes detection. What we don't know—and the question gives the novel its almost unbearable suspense—is whom he will kill next. A casual stranger? Or beautiful and gentle Dorothea Deverell? She is the one he has chosen, unbeknownst to her, to be his soul mate. And it follows, then, inevitably as death, that he will kill for her.

Soul/Mate is a rarity among thrillers: we are not only frightened by the horrific tale that unfolds in its stunning pages, we also believe in its overpowering reality.

Excerpt

trumpet Mr. Kreuzer had revealed to C.A. and a very small number of other privileged boys the secret of the X-factor, which democracy and Christianity and "archaic ethical remnants" sought to deny, but which manifested itself in the very genes and chromosomes of the biological organism—that approximately one tenth of one percent of the species Homo sapiens was destined to rule the rest, by way of superiority of intellect, personality, spiritual and physical strength, and that intangible element in the human psyche known as will. "Will is the conduit of fate," Mr. Kreuzer said. C.A. had not at first—for he was very young, a mere boy, a mere angel boy in whom his devil twin still slumbered!—comprehended. Will is the conduit of fate.

Reviews

Publisher's Weekly, March 31, 1989, p41
Booklist, April 1, 1989, p1329
Atlanta Journal Constitution, June 4, 1989, L, 10
New York Times Book Review, June 4, 1989, p16
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 27, 1989, C, 5

Other Editions

paperback

Soul/Mate

by Rosamond Smith

New York: Dutton, 1989

248 pages

Dust Jacket Blurb

Excerpt

Reviews

Other Editions