The Triumph of the Spider Monkey

by Joyce Carol Oates

Abandoned as a baby in a bus station locker, shuttled from one abusive foster home and detention center to another, Bobbie Gotteson grew up angry, hurting, damaged. His hunger to succeed as a musician brought him across the country to Hollywood, but along with it came his seething rage, his paranoid delusions, and his capacity for acts of shocking violence.

Unavailable for 40 years, The Triumph of the Spider Monkey is an eloquent, terrifying, heartbreaking exploration of madness by one of the most acclaimed authors of the past century. This definitive edition for the first time pairs the original novel with a never-before-collected companion novella by Joyce Carol Oates, unseen since its sole publication in a literary journal nearly half a century ago, which examines the impact of Gotteson’s killing spree on a woman who survived it, as seen through the eyes of the troubled young man hired by a private detective to surveil her...

Genres: Crime, Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Noir, American, Ebooks

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel Them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. From 2016 to 2020, she was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she taught short fiction in the spring semesters. She now teaches at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Pseudonyms: Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Possibly a lot of goodreaders with similar interests to mine may find the relative populism of Oates' best-known material sort of off-putting. Which is understandable, as she's written some very popular books that, though well-composed, often don't really distinguish her from masses of other decently composed melodramatists and social reformers.

But then she also writes books like this, the beautifully fractured and stylistically heightened monologues of a murderer, leaping erraticly (gracefully) across all parts of his experience, intercut with real and imagined bits of film shoots, courtroom interjections as he is tried for his crimes, and the cross-cut words of the jaded and uncaring authorities whose hands he passes through. It's all voraciously readable and disconcerting and fascinating. It might be her finest work.

Written in 1976, the same year as my other Oates favorite, Childwold, as with that one this was essentially a blind leap on a book I knew nothing about besides intriguing cover design and half-glimpsed modernist impulses upon first leaf-through. And as with that other favorite of 1976, no one else seems to have read this one and it seems to far outshine the stuff that's stayed in print.

In fact, Oates herself seems to have disowned this, describing it as "the most disgusting book I ever wrote". But it's really not. It's harsh in places, but even those are steeped with sadness and a piercing insight into the kinds of desperation that well up blackly from within as much as they are fanned into conflagration by the outside world.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

The latest offering from Hard Case Crime continues its journey through non-traditional crime fiction and away from the pulp detective genre. This book is actually a pair of novellas, both intricately connected in style, mood, tone, and subject matter.

The first is The Triumph of the Spider Monkey, which is told in a very non traditional style and is often realized in a stream of consciousness dreamlike world and its no ordinary consciousness that we are invited to enter, but that of a psychopathic murderer.

It flits from one line of thought to another and as we experience his raw insanity we ask whether he is honestly telling the story or if this is just a con job for the judge and jury who he at times seems to be addressing. Bobbie Gotteson is the killer and his story is one of a lost child of the sixties and seventies who claims he had a bad childhood (found in a bus station locker) and abused in jail and foster care. He hitchhiked across the country and ends up in a relationship with an older washed up actress. And half the story is his obsession with movies and screen tests and producers and crazy drugged out parties.

The prose can be beautiful and the mind explorations interesting, but the stream of consciousness is both it’s great asset and the difficulty with this artsy piece. Some of us perhaps just prefer a more traditional narrative.

The second novella “Love, Careless Love” shares the same style as the first piece but somehow is even less accessible.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Now this one is a difficult book to review. Not only is there a distinct disconnect between story and reader by virtue of the mode of storytelling which delivers a persistent dreamlike quality, the narrative confuses with its complexity and flippant disregard for any semblance of cohesion.

At it's core, The Triumph of the Spider Monkey is a sophisticated piece of literature with some truly poetic prose, deftly applied a times, to create an intense ride on the uncertain waves of madness.

Sounds contradictory and confusing doesn't it? The book is a real headscratcher which would struggle to make a lot of sense if not read in a single sitting (which I did, though I still have that 'what did I just read?' feeling). The unreliable narrator and macabre murders are white-noise against the slippery sequencing of events.

The book also contains a loosely connect novella titled Love, Endless Love, which echoes the tone of the novels previously published by Hard Case Crime featuring a casual private eye who falls for his quarry only to end up in a hospital for reasons largely unknown. Reader beware, the stylistic tones of the novella mirror that of the novel. Confusion abounds!

My rating: 3.5/5 - I think this is a book which requires a couple of reads to truly appreciate the complexities of the story.

[Prospero · Rating 2 out of 5]

This edition of The Triumph of the Spider Monkey actually contains two interconnected novellas, both published more than 40 years ago, but each failing to achieve what it set out to achieve.

The first, the titular "Triumph", presents a glimpse into no ordinary mind, but that of a deranged psychopath on trial for the brutal machete-murder of a group of airline stewardesses at a California motel. While the fractured stream-of-consciousness prose works well in theory for protagonists such as these in order to convey a sense of their inner delirium, unfortunately it's just a little too random and rambling in this instance to hold you sufficiently in its grip. The mind easily wanders between pages of meandering prose meant to reflect the tortured maunderings and self-deceptions of a tragic and disturbed young man. There are golden moments when striking truths emerge with clarity from the depths of murky prose meant to reflect the flaccidity and incoherence of his inner nature, but it's not enough. While the subplot of whether the story being told is true or concocted is interesting, and a moral arc teasing at redemption is hinted at, unfortunately the prose simply isn't arresting enough for the reader to care. There's little here that American Psycho hasn't done better.

The second novella, "Love, Careless Love", is even more abstract and inaccessible, and yet manages to achieve what the first doesn't - a sense of profundity. Told from the perspective of a troubled young man spending time with the sole witness of the killer's murderous spree, it's not quite clear what is going, but the striking truths emerge with more frequency and satisfaction, even if the plot seems so vague as to suggest that either something terrible has happened to the witness, or nothing at all. Again, a little too cerebral and overreaching in the pursuit of transcendence.

While it didn't quite hit the mark, I respect what the book was attempting to do. Unfortunately, the author's ambition outstripped her ability to execute, and so for that, 2/5.

[SmarterLilac · Rating 4 out of 5]

In a conversation published in The Lost Saranac Interviews, JCO said: 'The most disgusting thing I ever wrote was called The Triumph of the Spider Monkey, which was so disgusting I could barely read the galleys, and whenever anybody mentions it to me, I kind of look away and pretend I don't know what they're talking about. It's the first person confession of the maniac Bobbie Gotteson to Joyce Carol Oates.'

So, of course, I had to read it.

Um, is it wrong that I kind of...liked this? I think Oates did a good job capturing the mental make up of someone who could hack nine women to death, especially in the parts of the book where Gotteson is experiencing dissociation. I liked that she included more than a few characters who may not have actually killed anyone, but whose behavior is almost as reprehensible as Gotteson's (like the prison dentist.) It reminds me of Frankenstein's creature asking, 'Am I to be thought the only criminal when all of human kind sinned against me?'

I'm also a little freaked out by how similar Gotteson's self descriptions are to some of the things I hear my New Age friends say (though I'm pretty sure they've never murdered anyone). At one point, Bobbie Gotteson says, 'I am like you: a progression of states of mind, forms of sanity that keep moving and alluding direction.' At another point, he says that one of the people near him has sensed his 'thought waves.' Again, creepy, but I found it engrossing.

[Roger · Rating 1 out of 5]

The cover of Joyce Carol Oates' The Triumph of the Spider Monkey proclaims that this book has been out of print for forty years. I think we could easily have gone for fifty or sixty years and done ourselves no damage whatsoever. I know Oates is a lauded author with innumerable awards to her credit. And I love the Hard Case Crime line which has introduced me to a number of new authors and reading experiences. But this is simply one of the worst things I have ever read. I'm delighted this was a library book I'd feel terrible if I had spent money actually purchasing this. I have run across Oates before in my reading journey-I honestly do not get the attraction.

[Larou]

Considering the incredibly large amount of books that she has published, one would expect the works of Joyce Carol Oates to be mostly bland and streamlined, as easy to consume as they are (presumably) to write. And maybe some of them are, but everything I have read by her so far (the stories in High Lonesome: Selected Stories, 1966-2006 , the novel Childwold and now this novella) have swerved very far from the middle of the road and offered challenging, exciting reading experiences. I’ll likely bump into a dud one day, but that day has not yet arrived.

Triumph of the Spider Monkey, then, starts with a baby being pulled out of a duffel bag that was found in a coin locker – and from that moment onwards, this slim but intense book (so intense, in fact, that I actually had to put it for a while down after each chapter) is threaded through with images of trying to break free from a confining inside towards a liberated outside, or its reverse, of being forced from an open outside into a closed inside. And in a way, this mirrors the reader’s situation, because for the 90 pages this novella extends, we find ourselves trapped inside the mind of its narrator, one Bobbie Gotteson. And that mind is emphatically not a pleasant place to be, because Bobbie is a murderer who killed nine women (hacked them to death, as he tells us (or himself?) – the novella does not indulge in any graphic details of the acts, however).

As we are informed very early into the novella, all the voices we are going to encounter are Bobbie’s, even those that purport to be someone else’s.* And there are many voices in Bobbie’s head: Apart from his own and that of a third-person narrator who tells part of his story there is a whole court of law where he stands trial for one of his murders (but only one, because things have to be done properly and in order and one at a time). The voices are not in harmony either, they often interrupt, contradict, or even accuse each other; and Bobbie’s mind in general is quite a bit of a mess, with things tumbling and rattling about in no discernible order – while the novella does start out with Bobbie’s (kind of) birth from a coin locker, there is no narrative continuity for the rest of the novella, its chapters are a succession of fragmented pieces, resonating with fragmented voices that never come together to form a coherent story.

Which actually may not be quite true, because there is Bobbie’s full name which will immediately ring several alarm bells for anyone speaking German. Bobbie Gotteson = “Gottes Sohn” = German for “son of God”. So we get a serial killer as Jesus analogue with his life, as far as we are able to put it together, mirroring that of Jesus, more or less. Unfortunately Oates missed out on dividing the novella into 14 chapters (she opted for 20 instead), but explicit references to Jesus abound, from disciples to crucifixion, and are almost as frequent as the inside / outside imagery. This might be (and probably is) Bobbie attempting to get some meaningful structure into his shattered life, but there might be something more going on as well. It also is hardly a coincidence that a murderer of women is set in parallel to the messiah of a monotheistic, extremely patriarchal religion, but I think even that does not quite exhaust the significance this analogy has for this novella, there is also the aspect that it serves to set Bobbie apart from his fellow men, puts a vast distance between him and everyone else – which also ties in with him being “born” from a coin locker, i.e., nothing human.

It is very hard to write a book about a serial killer without ending up glorifying him in some way or another (all the more so if you are writing it from the inside of his mind) – in fact, Triumph of the Spider Monkey is the first book I have read which manages to avoid this entirely. And this is in spite of the Jesus analogy I just pointed out – or possibly at least partially because of it. For one thing, the novella does not offer a realistic narrative, not even in a sense of realism which would include stream-of-consciousness writing. Triumph of the Spider Monkey is as stylized as it is fragmented and at no moment lets readers forget that they are reading literature rather than peeking through a window into someone’s soul. And yet, even though it is “only” literature, and highly self-conscious literature at that, never pretending to be anything else – or rather (as you probably guessed) precisely because of it -, it tells us more about its subject than any supposedly transparent-to-its-object, telling-it-as-it-is, “unpretentious” writing ever could. I’ve said it on several occasions before (and probably will on several more), but I think one really can’t say it often enough: Realism still is very much overrated as a way of showing truth, especially if that truth is something the reader didn’t already know before.

It is only consequential, then, that the subject of Triumph of the Spider Monkey is not quite what it appears to be on first sight, that it’s not really the portrait of a serial killer. Or rather, that aspect of the novella is but a means to an end, or, to use a different metaphor, the symptom of the disease to which Joyce Carol Oates here offers the pathogenesis, namely loneliness. Bobbie Gotteson is someone who from the very beginning of his life has been cut off from any meaningful contact with other humans, nobody ever has reached out to him, with the result that he ends being caught in a loneliness so deep that the only way he can bridge the gap that parts him from other humans is by violence, effectively destroying what he desires most. Put like this, it does sound rather trite (and do keep in mind that this is just my reading of the novella, you might come up with something entirely different), but that’s another glorious thing about literature, especially of the non-realist variety (although it has to be said that realist literature can achieve that effect,too, but it has to work harder to get there) that you cannot really boil it down to a fabula docet because when all is said and done, literature (good literature, anyway) never is about anything at all but rests in itself, an autonomous work of art. (Of course, that negation of a reality outside itself constitutes a statement, too, but that is something to discuss when I’m doing a post on Theodor W. Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie , i.e. most likely never.) So, what Triumph of the Spider Monkey really boils down to is “a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In other words: very strongly recommended.





* We are told this by a footnote, which of course begs the question: who wrote it? Is it by Bobbie, too? Or did some other entity add that footnote?

[Cody | CodysBookshelf · Rating 3 out of 5]

I always feel bad when I rate a Joyce Carol Oates book less than four stars, because she is my favorite author and her immense talent is on display in all her works. But any writer as prolific as her will release some duds.

Not that this is a dud. It just didn’t totally work for me.

Written and published in the mid-70s, as a sort of “reaction” to the Manson trial, JCO has often referred to The Triumph of the Spider Monkey as her nastiest work, one she was almost embarrassed to recall. Recently Hard Case Crime reprinted this out of print novella, and for that I am thankful — I didn’t want to risk damaging my first edition!

This short work delves into the mind of a maniac, a wannabe rock star and serial killer. Told in a heated, unwavering stream of consciousness style as only Joyce Carol Oates can do, this story is challenging and uncomfortable and claustrophobic. It delves into some truly wicked stuff, but it’s no Zombie.

I found myself totally detached from the characters and their situations, which is strange for a work by JCO. I suppose that’s a commentary on the narrator’s mind; he is detached, therefore the reader is. And that holds some weight, but it doesn’t make for particularly enjoyable reading — at times — at least for this reader. A solid 3 stars.

Read for ‘novella’ in Halloween Bingo.

[Ellen · Rating 2 out of 5]

might just be a bit tired of violent misogyny or maybe it's just not a very good book idk

[Runalong · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m not sure I liked it but I respect the writing and possibly what I think it was trying to do. That I still think of days after finishing means it did something right

Full review - https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/bl...

[Moran · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book surprised me by being two stories in one, both taking place in the same universe but just barely overlapping.

The first story is about a maniac who kills women. While I believe Joyce Carol Oates is a talented writer, the story itself is lackluster and the characters are not interesting. The loose fragments through which the story is told don't feel like they amount to anything of substance. At some points, the narrative felt like it was approaching something similar to Less Than Zero. In a lot of ways, this story feels like the spiritual predecessor to that novel in that both take place in Los Angeles amidst warm weather and glamorous lifestyles, but instead choose to focus on the darker elements of the city and its people.

While the narrative and characters disappointed, I will say that Oates's writing really impressed. I particularly enjoyed a short chapter, Chapter 9: Unfilmed Love Scene (In the Back Seat of Melva's Rolls-Royce). In about 5 pages, Oates manages to relate three different interactions and narratives. The way in which she is able to jump along the story's timeline and across locations without sacrificing the reader's attention is incredible! I truly found those 5 pages a joy to read.

The second novella is about a man hired to track down a woman and who ends up falling in love with her. This story in terms of narrative and character development was better, but felt a bit muddled towards the beginning and the end. The uninterrupted style of the novella (there are no chapter breaks) was a better format than that of the prior story (which utilized varied writing styles and different chapter lengths (sometimes a paragraph, sometimes 20 pages) and lost some momentum as a result).

[Bookreporter.com Mystery & Thriller · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readers and authors alike are in uniform awe of Joyce Carol Oates. Though her writing career is well into its sixth decade, she shows no signs of slowing down. What is equally remarkable is that her work eludes easy classification. One is tempted to slip this or that title (or short story) into “horror,” “mystery,” “romance” or even “supernatural,” but the edges constantly and consistently blur. The theme that runs through all of her stories and novels, however, is the dark side of the human psyche in its manifestations and consequences.

It is difficult (though not impossible) to find a complete list of Oates’ works, given her prolific output, which makes the publication of THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY all the more remarkable. This new edition consists of both the title novel and a related novella, “Love, Careless Love.” The former has been out of print for over 40 years; the latter previously saw the light of day in a literary journal of limited circulation at a similarly removed distance. Both are as dark as night in atmosphere and subject matter.

"Oates digs so deeply into the psyche of the murderous personality that it makes for rough reading in parts, but the subject matter is not and should not be sacrificed on the altar of the reader’s comfort zone."

THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY is the story of Bobbie Gotteson, a singer-songwriter who is a legend in his own disturbed and angry mind. Most of the narrative is given over to him, with some interludes consisting of interview transcripts and newspaper articles. The reader learns that, when he was just a baby, Gotteson was discovered after being abandoned in a bus station locker. His childhood was spent being transferred to and from foster homes and detention centers, where the abuse was varied but almost always constant. Along the way, he learned how to play the guitar and wrote songs of a sort.

Gotteson’s career, if one could call it that, seems to consist of a cycle of orbiting around or near this or that artist who misappropriated his work and achieved success with it, always without recognition and/or financial compensation accruing to Gotteson himself. At the same time, he was venting his anger with a series of shocking acts of violence. These stopped only when he was apprehended following a mass killing from which one of his intended victims escaped, though the psychological damage to the woman remained. Her story is told in “Love, Careless Love,” which demonstrates the ripple effect that these types of crimes visit upon the victims and those around them.

The parallels between Gotteson and Charles Manson (and, to a lesser extent, Richard Speck) might not be immediately obvious to those who aren’t aware of Manson’s tenuous ties to the California music scene, but they are there and all the more chilling for it. Oates digs so deeply into the psyche of the murderous personality that it makes for rough reading in parts, but the subject matter is not and should not be sacrificed on the altar of the reader’s comfort zone.

That said, this is not a volume that one who has not read Oates’ work should reach for as an introduction. Its publication, though, is still important and ultimately indispensable for anyone who is even marginally familiar with Oates, one of the great literary voices of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

I can now understand Oates' reluctance to discuss this novel. What a mess! I have read a lot of her woks, though more current ones mostly, and the first offering in this edition - the titular tale - has few of her writing hallmarks, if any. The piece is so scattered and nearly impossible to follow. Which is real, which is retelling, which is fantasy? Strangely, not all that grim, nasty, or violent either. Rather poorly constructed too, if at all. I was expecting/hoping to read something quite unsettling and unseemly in an extreme way, since the autho has damned the work, and she has been known to publish and discuss works of her own that are sublimely disturbing and awfully ghastly.
The second companion novella/short story is equally bizarre in its pacing and structure. If I hadn't known its plot and relation to the first piece I would have been hard-pressed to connect the two. There is more Oates-ian style in "Love, Careless Love", but it is so disjointed and phantasmic as to be nearly unrecognizable as anything but a fever dream.
I would imagine only true Oates completists would seek this out. Any reader looking for a textual "A Serbian Film" would do well to go elsewhere, as this is hardly a book that meets its advertised grotesquerie.

[Daniel Polansky]

The scattered, psychedelic, horrific recollections of a 1960's serial killer, and a companion novelette of similar nastiness. Skillfully written, and disturbing in both its content and confused form. An effectively nightmarish little trifle, though I'm not exactly sure who I could recommend it to.

[Kate · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[Oliver Clarke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ummmm

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try to keep humble, aware that I could live millennia and still have incalculable quantities to learn. Wisdom itself requires such sensitivities re: wisdom's fundamental condition of limit. Still, I am a little taken aback to have only very recently come to be conscious of being conscious of the existence of Hard Case Crime, a publishing imprint that began in 2004 as a subsidiary organ of Dorchester Publishing, floating over to Titan Books in 2011. Hard Case mostly publishes forgotten or neglected crime fiction, along with the odd contemporary curio consonant with traditional pulp orthodoxy. They publish these sordid literary jewels in editions featuring old-school-style dime novel covers, the delicious original art evidently provided for the most part by Robert McGinnis and Glen Orbik. It's weird that I have only just recently gotten hip to Hard Case Crime because I have always had a bit of a yen for this kind of stuff, though my tastes may generally run to things of a more rarified nature. I love the hardboiled crime novel above all else because I love the literary imagination’s love affair with the aberrant and the amoral. When Raymond Chandler writes of his fiction that the whole point is that the modern world is a crooked, grimy racket—any fool who takes on moral airs, preaching platitudinous, can be established as a liar or dupe with nothing more than a quick glance in nearabouts any direction—this too speaks to me. The world is an oft ghastly place and people are done dirty as a matter of routine. Dig how unapologetically pulp fiction and exploitation films are marketed. That’s where those dime novel covers come in; it’s the raison d’être behind these Hard Case Crime pastiche-jobs. I picked up my first of their editions a month or two ago. Oakley Hall’s long-out-of-print 1950 novel SO MANY DOORS. I was pretty jazzed about it, though I have not cracked my copy yet. I'm a longtime fan, having first heard about Hall as a teenager because Thomas Pynchon and Richard Fariña were outspoken devotees of his very Wyatt Earpy Western classic WARLOCK. The Hard Case edition of SO MANY DOORS was a delightful discovery. I have started making a point of inspecting crime and mystery sections at various bookstores. Scoping for Hard Case. This is, naturally, how I come upon the new edition of Joyce Carol Oates’ THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY, which I subsequently waste very little time getting to. I mean, like, really! There is that kooky title, for one thing, plus of course the cover art c/o the aforementioned Robert McGinnis, also decidedly wild. But that’s hardly the extent of it. Like the Oakley Hall, THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY has not been available in any edition for a very, very long time. A blurb on the cover says forty years. The novel is from 1974. The last edition would appear to have dropped in '79. Yes, exactly forty years. Now, believe it or not, this is still not the extent of the fascination here. This edition also contains a novella from 1976, entitled “Love, Careless Love,” that is explicitly related to the featured novel. “Love, Careless Love” was only ever published in an unnamed literary journal, never to be subsequently incorporated into any collection of any kind. Here it finally is, occupying its proper place. Very cool. Neither THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY, the novel proper, nor “Love, Careless Love” are likely to be anybody’s idea of straight genre fiction. (Not maybe surprising, it's Joyce Carol Oates.) What we have here is wildly adventurous 1970s literary fiction with psycho killer furnishings. Oates was in her mid to late thirties when she wrote and published this stuff, already an extraordinary stylist, bravely experimental, not shy either of venturing into uncharted waters or of going deep and dark once she gets there. Both texts included here are magnificent, but my contention would be that it is precisely their juxtaposition, their incorporation into a single volume, that presents us with what I will not hesitate to call a masterpiece. If the two pieces are literary fiction—I would even call them decidedly challenging works of modernism—rather than salacious genre claptrap, this can only be inevitable based on what I take to be the central theme of both, namely the dissolution of identity, familiar to fans of Joyce and Woolf, and a subject (with attendant methodologies) that I not only love, but in the mire of which I have myself had occasion to toil … for my, ahem, art. Crime features in these texts. There can be no denying that. But to call this stuff “hardboiled” or even “crime fiction” would be to do it a disservice, not that I fail to be tickled by the packaging, my finding subversions of this variety sometimes agreeable. The main attraction, the short novel THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY, caused me to think of Oates’ 1995 novel ZOMBIE, likewise a bold and enterprising literary experiment with psycho killer furnishings. ZOMBIE was a book I loved as a teenager. It was Oates’ attempt to grapple with the unseemly headline-grabbing misadventures of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, especially as regards the infamous Milwaukeean’s obsession with creating docile sex slaves by way of direct, gruesome manipulation of his victims’ brains. ZOMBIE was not about Jeffery Dahmer per se. Oates made an effort to obfuscate matters, altering backstory and other specificities. If you were one of the F.B.I. behaviourists working out of Quantico, you might be inclined to say that ZOMBIE dealt not with Dhamer specifically, but rather with elements of the Dahmer profile. In a smiliar way, THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY appears to deal quite candidly with elements of the Charles Manson profile, a subject that would still have been extremely fresh for most readers in 1974. Elements of the Manson profile, but not exactly Charlie himself. There is no commune, no Spahn Ranch or thinly-veiled equivalent. If any of the famous principles involved in, on the wrong end of, or hovering adjacent to the homicides committed by Charlie & Family are present in Oates’ novel, they have been so utterly altered and/or composited as to make sorting such matters out a sucker’s gambit at best. We might simply begin by noting that SPIDER MONKEY's itinerant (and ultimately Los Angeles-transplanted) Maniac, Bobbie Gotteson, the titular simian creature, is an uncannily captivating, peculiarly irresistible song-and-dance man uncommonly short in stature, his ravaged psyche concatenated primarily in foster homes and penal institutions. The novel begins with a short chapter entitled “Nativity.” Bobbie Gotteson is born in Locker 79-C in the waiting room of Trailways Bus Terminal, New York City, 6:05 PM, February 14, 1944, “delivered by some amazed outraged bastard in a uniform to the surprise and anger and gradual disappointment of the crowd.” It seems more likely that he was born outside of the locker and then stuffed into it subsequently, abandoned, but that is not how Bobbie presents the matter. A jarring space-time splice jostles the reader. Bobbie is on trial for homicide. He says he is on trial for his life. A footnote informs us that Bobbie has been told repeatedly that capital punishment has been abolished in the State of California, though he is apparently unable or unwilling to accept this fact. Additionally, the footnote informs us, crucially, all “remarks” we have read or are going to read “in this strange document are the Maniac’s even those he attributes to the ‘court’ and to other people.” Bobbie is the organizing intelligence of the text we are reading, the entirety of it, and his is a trickster sensibility. Later he refers to the text we are reading as “this jokey confession.” He will speak in the first person, he will refer to himself in the third person, he will present dialogues with horribly cruel authorities as though in the form of direct transcription, and occasionally he will write as omniscient(ish) third person. The book is narrated by an oscillating trickster subject-position. Bobbie does not have a commune or a Manson-style Family, but he has developed something of a cult. Scraggly kids have amassed, picketing outside the Hall of Justice. Bobbie Gotteson presents a version of Manson’s famously “performed” madness. “I can play sane, like you. Like everyone. Sometimes I played insane, but now I am very sane. My mind is a net, with holes in it that can be very tiny or quite large; to sift things through or to catch them.” Bobbie played crazy in a jail in Reno, a survival tactic, and it served him well. “At another place where they give you tokens for behaving well, instead of beating you, I acted so well that I accumulated heavy sagging pockets filled with tokens.” Bobbie, like Manson, sees himself as a perverse reflection of the societal norm. “I am like you: a progression of states of mind, forms of sanity that keep moving and eluding definition.” This is a statement clearly containing a disconcerting amount of elemental truth. Manson & Family constantly insisted that there is no death and that time isn’t real. Bobbie will occasionally ascribe God-like agency to himself: “A Maniac is immortal. He cannot be killed except by his own manipulations.” Anybody he hacked up with his sacred Machete, Bobby insists, died of psychic suicide, they willed it, or Will itself willed it by way of them. Will is tantamount, but as slippery as identity, subjectivity. Bobbie recounts fragments of his journey to California with an older man, a man who raped him in prison and thereby became his beloved keeper. “I think that was the newness of my powers, the fear of them I had then because I was just a kid, the way my mind could seize hold of reality and give a shape to it, to mold other people to my will; I wasn’t used to it yet.” Hence Will itself. Will is greater than Bobbie’s Will. Will is the narrator of All, and it is ultimately God who is the Maniac. Like Manson, Bobbie sees himself as a spiritual adept, a seer. There is some kind of electricity in him, it can make his case convincing. He collects passing adherents, Hollywood-types, like Melva, mother of two, owner of a Rolls-Royce, young Sharleen M., others … they fade in and out. He performed songs at a club called Lucky Pierre’s. He says he did studio screen tests and appeared in underground films. He says he was courted by the millionaire Vanbrugh, or courted him, or both. The Survivors turned Bobbie’s song “Unlearning to Live” into “Learning to Love,” changed the lyrics too, ripped him off in the process … just like the Beach Boys, whose Dennis Wilson had befriended Charlie, turned Manson’s “Cease to Exist” into “Never Learn Not to Love.” The district attorney repeatedly insinuates himself to cast doubt on all of this. You were a disgusting animal, nobody was interested in making you famous. But we already know that all the voices deployed in the text are Bobbie, a kind of occult pantomime. Bobbie believes that music and mayhem are linked to a general compulsion “to transcend physical distress.” This distress comes from a legacy of trauma, institutionalization. He muses, Manson-like, on Ego-Smashing and Soul-Programming. “I couldn’t come from anything normal and good. No. Because if I came from anything normal and good I wouldn’t be the Maniac I am. But since if everything in the world comes from the world and is normal and good, I must be somehow normal and good … somehow or other.” Bobbie, unlike Manson, mostly commits his own murders. He would appear to have Machete-blitzed a great many people, a residence full of stewardesses foremost among them. That particular crime scene is slightly hazy. One victim who survived apparently saw multiple assailants. “I didn’t kill them alone, either, but had disciples to help me, every blood-spattered exhausting moment.” The disciples, varying considerably in age, “sprang out of my head when I willed them into birth.” Before his apprehension, witness descriptions of Bobbie’s physical appearance varied immensely, perplexingly. Bobbie the Maniac, God the Maniac, Will the All. A spider monkey, shape-shifter, a devouring, clambering aberration, some kind of visitation, far too close to home. We have some cause to suspect that Dewalene, the object of something like desire in “Love, Careless Love,” is the stewardess who survived to tell of multiple marauding killers. The novella is written in lengthier bursts, the prose more liquid, amorphous, filling in nooks and crannies, obliterating delimited reality though process and accretion. Things are not very certain. Dewalene may be Darlene, she may be Clare, she is in a key sense a multiplicity, resisting even cursory fixity. A young man named Jules, a Los Angeles transplant like Bobbie, has been hired under mysterious circumstances to track her by a man named Ganzfeld, becomes embroiled, loses what precious little is left of his bearings. Dewalene may be fleeing from an obligation to testify at a trial relating to the slaughter of a domicile full of stewardesses, a trial currently being picketed by a mob of youthful groupies. Dewalene echoes some of Bobbie’s talking points: “she told him about other creatures, other animals, how all living things had to endure their freakishness, what caused them to survive but also to declare themselves against the landscape …” She talks about ducks. “In that species the female must be valued, so she is colorless, but the male is plumed and lovely and can die …” What you breathe breathes you, and “Nature makes no mistakes.” Figures on the margin loom, and there is the sense, as with Manson’s Hollywood, that a cabal of conspirators oversee the oblique dramatics, malignant machinations undergird the scene. In his encounter with a mysterious woman and the window of greater mysteries she opens, Jules will be dissolved and devoured, particulated. The final pages lead us to the cosmic interstice of life and death, a pinpoint of depersonalized intensity. Perhaps it is as Bobbie says: there is only distress and transcendence. Oates dedicated THE TRIUMPH OF THE SPIDER MONKEY to “those on the Outside.” The two texts combined at long last in the Hard Case Crime edition repeatedly return to the dichotomy of Inside and Outside. The Inside has a double sense, but the two senses collapse in on one another: to be Inside in the institutionalized sense means to be in prison, some kind of custody, but the Inside is also the self’s interior experience of selfhood, itself a prison (a distress). We might think that dedicating the work to those on the Outside is a way of establishing solidarity with victims. I don’t see it that way. I see it as positioning Oates herself Inside, writing Out-ward. Inside the prison of an irresistible nightmare that called to her, seduced her. Our prisons, institutional or personal, are above all schools of apocalyptic resentment. Bobbie sings: “hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate pity.”

[Chrystal Hays · Rating 3 out of 5]

The novella included with this is possibly the better read.
I'm a fan of JCO, but I feel a real need for an introduction or afterword, or bridge, or something to shepherd us through these.
There's nothing...they are just here.
Not a wasted afternoon, but I probably could have spent the money on one of her other works and been happier.

One narrator is clearly insane and unreliable.

The other? Pretty insane and unreliable.

[Carlos · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found it difficult to get through this book (or should I say two) - it is a challenging read with very unreliable narrators. Often, i didn’t know what was going on and where t was going (but I assume this was intentional).

I went to DNF this a couple of times, but then didn’t thinking I might enjoy it later on; I didn’t really.

[kyra majewski · Rating 2 out of 5]

i wish this wasn’t my first joyce carol oates book but what are ya gonna do. it was hard for me to follow and just had too much violence without serving any sort of plot

[Craig Childs · Rating 3 out of 5]

This early literary novella from Joyce Carol Oates is written almost entirely in stream-of-consciousness from the viewpoint of Bobbie Gotteson, a psychopath character loosely modeled on Charles Manson.

The narrative flip-flops back and forth in time to cover his life story: a transit worker discovering him at 1 week-old, stuffed inside a duffel bag in a bus terminal locker; his harsh treatment growing up in foster homes; his jailhouse lover; his trek from New York to Los Angeles; his ambition to be a singer, then an actor; hacking nine women to death with a machete; his transformation into a cult leader; and his eventual trial.

The prose is dense, sometimes frustrating, and the plot (what little there is of it) often gets obscured. However, the writing is sublime--it feels like being stuck inside the jumbled neurotic thoughts of a charismatic lunatic. It is a world filled with disjointed poetry and dark rambling fantasies that cannot be easily distinguished from reality.

Multiple, often contradictory voices ebb and flow within Bobbie's mind. Viewpoints shift between first-person and third-person and back again, sometimes all within a single sentence.
Here are some colorful representative samples of the writing style:

(In this scene Bobbie is a child being mistreated by one of his foster mothers):

"I yelled at her (it was some woman grabbing me by the shoulders tough and ready to bite and screaming back into my face) and when that didn't work I whispered starting to sob, didn't she know I could do anything if I let my mind free?-- if I unleashed it to do my secret will? And she just shook me and screamed and banged me against the wall and the radiator and my powers rushed to me, filling out my skinny arms and legs and chest, but she had more power, she had the power of thumping me back against the radiator so my left leg was in terrible pain and I could not get my mind razor-sharp enough to slice sideways through her."

(In this scene, Bobbie acknowledges his conflicted feeling towards all women):

"Yes, they loved him. He was never to blame. They cringed and writhed for him, they squealed, pressed themselves against him accidentally in crowds at Venice Park or in big jumbled weekend streams of tourists and lower class suburban sightseers along the Strip, couldn't get enough of him. Gotteson had to learn quickly to harden his heart against that horde, or his singing-potency would have been decimated long ago….He hated them. Hate hate hate hate hate hated them. No not all of them, but most of them--sweetheart-greenies wouldn't blur the image sufficiently because the terrible truth was that, inside the hate, like a tiny perfumy current making its way slyly up through an enormous gaseous poison, was something like pity. He knew them from the inside. He was crucified on the cross of his pity for females…."

I am not normally a fan of experimental writing, and I do not know that I would care to read several books in this vein, but I have to laud Hard Case Crime for bringing this to light. It is a tour de force, a unique reading experience that is worth the effort to unravel.

This book also includes a quasi-sequel/companion novella "Love, Careless Love." It has never before been anthologized or collected into book form, which is not surprising because it is, frankly, a muddled mess. Dewalene is a former member of Bobbie Gotteson's cult who witnessed his slaughter of four stewardesses in a Pasadena bungalow. Jules is an indigent laborer who is hired by persons unknown to drive her to safety before she testifies in Bobbie's trial. Jules falls for her and, like many of Oates' male protagonists, his emotions are heavily tinted by lust, misogyny, paranoia, and a desire to control her. The ending is nebulous. It hints Dewalene might have been murdered by surviving cult members, or maybe Jules killed her, or maybe she was spirited away into a witness protection program. Honestly, it is difficult to know what the heck is going on at all in this tiresome story.

Four stars for the title novella. One star for the sequel story.

[Hamlen · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an early piece from JCO. It shows some of the hallmarks (as I see it) of her style that will develop over the coming decades. At the point this book was published her writing seems undeveloped. As time moved on, these elements of style become more effective and she has entertained me for decades with her grotesques.

This book, story, was published under the Hard Case Crime imprint in 2019. If you are reading for a study on the development of JCO's craft this is a 5* offering. If you are reading for pleasure, try some of her later works, like Zombie.

[Trina · Rating 2 out of 5]

Did not finish, but love this author.

[Dina · Rating 2 out of 5]

I usually love her stuff, but this is not it.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 1/4 stars

[Elite Group · Rating 4 out of 5]

A terrifying insight into the mind of a maniac

This is not the sort of book that I would normally read but as a reviewer I am happy to try any genre and give my honest opinion.

I found this book absolutely terrifying. The author’s insight into Bobby Gotteson, the Spider Monkey of the title is horrendous and written in such an original way that it was fascinating. (I have never read any other books by this author so it may be that her other books are written in a similar style.)

Although the murders committed are completely horrifying somehow you are transported into Bobby’s mind and realise that he does not seem to realise what he is actually doing. The description of his life, from being abandoned in a bus station locker, to his physical and mental abuse, although obviously not condoning his crimes, at least gives some ideas of why and how he may have been compelled to commit them. When I read about his treatment by the dentist in the prison I actually shuddered, I hate going to the dentist and insist on a huge amounts of anaesthetic every time!

I actually did not enjoy the companion novella, although I understood how Jules, another disturbed man, was employed to watch over a survivor of Bobby’s I found the interaction between them confusing and for me it did not really add anything to the original story.

To summarise although this is not the sort of book I enjoy I have to admire the amazing writing and it is not something that I will forget for quite some time.

Dexter

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review

[Richard Schaefer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This Hard Case Crimes paperback actually features the titular novel (long out of print) and a novella “Love, Careless Love” (seeing its first publication in book form). The novel is about a delusional serial killer Bobbie Gotteson who is trying to make it as a troubadour/actor in Hollywood. We see things from his perspective, and are never sure quite what is real. He sometimes refers to himself in third person, addresses a possibly-imaginary courtroom, and shares poems and songs he’s written. Chapter titles are a nice addition to the fragmentary narrative. If you’ve read other books by JCO, you know she’s not afraid of violence and she’s not afraid of purple prose. I don’t mean it as an insult, but it’s there in some of the run on sentences full of ands. While reading the book I felt hints of Charles Manson, of MKUltra, of Richard Speck. We get details of the protagonist’s(?) wretched childhood, miserable adolescence, and hallucinatory adulthood. I’d feel kind of bad for him, if I really believed anything coming from his mind was the truth.
The novella “Love, Careless Love” was less impressive, and more burdened by the aforementioned purple prose. It’s about a survivor of one of Bobbie Gotteson’s attacks, as narrated by someone only slightly less unhinged than Bobbie. He is the male gaze incarnate, quite literally in places, but the ending didn’t come together for me as I’d hoped.
I do recommend the novel for fans of JCO or serial killer fiction, but the novella is slightly less impressive.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm a fan of Joyce Carol Oates and have read and enjoyed several of her novels and short story collections. However this one left me a little perplexed. It was originally published in 1974 and tells the story of a psychopathic killer from his point of view in a stream-of-consciousness style. The killer seems to be modeled somewhat after Charles Manson with no empathy for his victims. The narrative goes back and forth in time and covers his life story from when he was discovered as a baby stuffed inside a duffel bag in a bus terminal locker to his harsh treatment growing up in foster homes and on to time in prison and eventually to his life in L.A. where he strives to be a singer and actor. And then he hacks nine women to death with a machete, becomes somewhat of a cult leader and is then on trial for his crimes. Oates prose is sometimes dense and hard to follow while the plot tends to get lost in the telling. The writing is filled with rambling fantasies and rambling poetry and at the end it kind of leaves you wondering... what was that all about??

Also included in this volume was an equally disjointed novella called Love, Careless Love. This was written in the same style and is also a hard one to follow. Overall, I would only recommend this volume to die hard JCO fans. I'll be looking forward to reading something more conventional from her.

[James Stone · Rating 3 out of 5]

This novella is 40 or so years old. It is a good story. It is a first person, sort of stream of consciousness account of a serial killer and his descent into madness. The protagonist wields a sword or machete with which he revels in beheading his young female victims.
It’s not an easy read as the character is delusional. He seems to have a talent for playing guitar, singing and songwriting. Or does he? What is real and what he imagines.
If you are a devotee of Joyce Carol Oates then you may enjoy the book. I can’t recommend it otherwise as it does not deliver enough of a story to make it worthwhile for the typical reader.
I read the Hard Case Crime edition, which also contains a shorter piece, perhaps a novella, about the one girl who survived her ordeal with the killer in Spider Monkey. It is somewhat interesting, but also lacks coherence.
I gave the book 3 stars because in places the writing is glorious, brilliant even. If you are looking for something different, give the book a go. If you are looking for a book like JCO’s book, them, look elsewhere.

[Kenneth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Triumph of the Spider Monkey is a novel the author wrote in the early-mid 1970's which is a sort of stream of consciousness of a psychopathic killer. Not really in chronological order, we get tastes of him speaking in the courtroom on trial, with lots of flashbacks of his association with various people in Hollywood especially one washed up actress. Written in the era not long after Charles Manson and his associates were convicted of mass murders.

This edition also includes the novella "Love, Careless Love", in which a private eye is hired to spy on a survivor of a mass killing (linking it with the main novel) but who ends up falling in love with her. What could go wrong? The novella opens with scenes from his hospital bed.