Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon

by Rosamond Smith

As Rosamond Smith, Joyce Carol Oates has explored the secret kinship of twins, often depicted as diabolical doubles who are mirror images of our darker, more violent selves - haunting reflections of our fears and dreads. In Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon, she takes this convention to terrifying new heights, as we enter the mind and heart of a female serial killer who seeks refuge with her estranged twin sister.

Starr Bright is the tormented, murderous side of Sharon Donner, a model and exotic dancer turned avenging angel. A drifter who has staked out the Nevada desert as her own personal hell, she lives in a desolate landscape of endless highways and seedy motel rooms. Night after night, she searches for God and love in the fleeting, brutish attentions of men. She travels light: a wallet, some cosmetics, amphetamines, and one pearl-handled stainless steel carving knife with a five-inch blade. her calling card is a satanic star traed with each of her victims' blood, proof that she is keeping her promise that "Star Bright will be with you soon".

Now, on the eve of her thirty-seventh birthday Starr/Sharon returns home to reclaim the part of herself she left behind. She arrives in Yewville, a quiet New York suburb where her twin sister, Lily, lives with her husband and teenage daughter. Here, thousands of miles away from the scenes of her horrific crimes, she insinuates herself into Lily's community, Lily's family, Lily's life.

A novel of tense and mesmerising power, Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon is a haunting exploration of the helplessness and rage buried deep in the female psyche - and of the intimate, unspoken bond that sisters share.

Genres: Fiction, Suspense, Thriller, Adult, Novels, Horror, Mystery

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

Rosamond Smith is a pseudonym for Joyce Carol Oates.

Reviews

[Always Pouting]

Sharon has always been beautiful but unfortunately she hasn't been a good judge of character. After a life time of betrayal and abuse at the hands of men Sharon snaps. Living in Vegas and using the stage name Starr Bright, Sharon is an exotic dancer who holds out hope until a man she spends the night with rapes and beats her after she tries to steal his wallet in the morning before sneaking away. Sharon snaps and murders him and begins her spree of killing men as she travels through the country. Eventually she ends up at her twin sister Lily's house where she hides out. Lily who had always been overlooked by everyone because of Sharon is surprised to see her sister after so many years, but Sharon has a hold on Lily and Lily lets Sharon stay with her. Lily and her family are enamored with Sharon but as she stays longer she begins to have a negative influence on Lily's daughter and Lily feels helpless to stop Sharon from tearing apart her family. Sharon begins to lose even more control eventually leading up to the final murder, that of the person who began Sharon's decent into a cycle of bad romantic choices and constant pain and growing emotional instability.

I really enjoyed this even thought at first I was having trouble because Sharon's POV is so distorted and messy, which is the point. When we get on to Lily's POV things get much easier to understand and keep up with because unlike Sharon she's not bordering on psychosis. I really enjoyed watching the story unfold, especially after Sharon turns up at Lily's house. Also watching Sharon's deteriorating mental state was fascinating, even though that probably make me sounds like a horrible person. It was just so well done and realistic though, the conflicting behavior she displayed and the intersecting of their religious upbringing with Sharon's own trauma. The only thing that bothered me may have been the beginning of the book when the rape scene was happening. It was really graphic and I had to put the book down after the whole thing was done and take a break because it really go to me. I even liked the way it ended because it came around full circle and usually book endings tend to be disappointing for me but I was surprisingly satisfied here.

Also maybe I'm just a vengeful awful person but it was super satisfying when she killed him at the end I almost thought they'd stop her before she could there for a second it was totally deserved.

[mark monday]

sometimes it is hard to say no, and sometimes when i love an author, especially an author i've read for much of my life, especially an author whose themes fascinate me, i start to think of them as a part of myself, i start to think of them as that part in which i can see the flaws but can still forgive all of them, it is hard to say no to them, it is hard not to see quality in even their weakest efforts; and so it is with Joyce Carol Oates, and so it is with her pseudonym Rosamond Smith: Oates being a distaff version of the western literary canon's tough guys - their endless searches for male identity reflected in her reinvention of feminism into some dark search for self, a search for the true nature of femininity, Rosamond Smith herself being a distaff version of tough guy Oates - eternally questing to redefine genre and eternally obsessed with the morbid things from which most avert their eyes; and so the story is typical for Oates in her desire to eviscerate then reconstruct models of strong and weak womanhood, and so the story is typical for Smith in her play with doubles and murder and reflections of self; and so it features a heroine who is so weak and simpering and remorseful that it becomes almost intolerable, and so it also features a heroine who is so strong and terrible and remorseless that it almost becomes wish fulfillment - an exotic dancer and cunning grifter, an exotic dancer and a completely batshit crazy serial killer; and so it is all so satisfying in a way to contemplate the breadth of Oates' abilities and the beautiful ambiguity of her writing, and yet it is all so unsatisfying to see the themes and doubling so predictably laid out as if by template, as if Oates' exorcism of these ideas has become nothing more than an ongoing bodily function; and it is as if i make excuses for a less than brilliant, lifeless tale simply because it is coming from an author that i feel has always been a brilliant and lifelong friend.

[nemo ☠️]

"She wasn't a girl for the harsh overexposed hours of morning or afternoon in the desert, her nocturnal soul best roused at twilight when neon lights flashed and pulsed into life."

ok first of all the blurb gives WAY TOO MUCH AWAY so don't read that shit.

i've been meaning to read a book by joyce carol oates for nine centuries so of course i do the sensible thing and read an obscure one by a pseudonym with a mediocre average rating rather than her most popular ones. (yeah, i don't understand my brain either.) but it paid off!!

i really, really loved this book. i think it has a lot of low/mediocre ratings because people were expecting some sort of mystery or a plot-driven thriller, but this novel is very much character-driven and explores the psyche of a serial killer.

sharon/starr bright is one of the best characters i've read in a while. she is unequivocally a terrible person, which can be seen not just by the fact that she's a serial killer but also from her interactions with other characters, and in her sister lily's memories of her as a child. but at the same time, Oates creates so much sympathy for her, so the reader is in limbo between disgust and pity, which is a really hard thing for a writer to do! one can sympathise with sharon's quest to rid the world of misogynistic pigs; but she is not a superhero vigilante and ends up trying to twist good people into bad people so she can wreak her revenge on them.

i don't really want to say anymore because i might give stuff away. (i'm worried i've given too much away already!) but this was an exquisitely written novel with incredibly compelling characters, and i'd definitely recommend it if you like character-driven books.

[Dave]

Oates, in a career spanning from 1964 to 2025, penned 58 or 59 novels and numerous short story collections. Eight of her novels were published under the pen name Rosamond Smith. Characteristically atmospheric, her crime novels always have an odd oft-putting feel, including this one.(

“Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon” feels a bit like Lawrence Block’s Kit Tolliver stories as both have a marauding woman wandering across the country, killing men she picks up along the way, particularly those who turn on her. But it’s a bit different in that Starr Bright has lost her mind along the way and is a bit of Charles Manson Bible-quoting pig-hating crazy with a duality of identity coming to a head when she returns home to see her sister and the now-teenage daughter she dumped off on her sister.

Written with day-glo coloring that will remind the reader a bit of Tom Wolfe writing in the “Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” this novel, particularly in the beginning, has a whole swagger to it. Indeed, Starr has a swagger and an attitude all her own from her smoke-tinted designer glasses on down. “She wasn’t a girl for the harsh overexposed hours of morning or afternoon in the desert, her nocturnal soul best roused at twilight when neon lights flashed and pulsed into life.”

But Starr is not just some crazy princess in a miniskirt. For her, and Oates sets this up well, “the nightmares of childhood never end but continue beneath the surface of memory as beneath the surface of choppy murky water.” You get that Starr is broken beyond fixing despite her outer shell of glamour. Starr has a knack for picking up the wrong guys, guys who beat her without a second thought. She fights back with her blade, spilling blood everywhere and writing her signature on the walls: “DIE PIG FILTH DIE SATAN.”

Starr’s duality and shattered soul is hidden from all who meet her as it is masked under her glamour persona. A brilliant journey through her world — through her eyes.

[Larry Bassett]

I understand the Rosamond Smith / Joyce Carol Oates books often have something to do with twins. I don’t know why. But there are twins in Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon.

I often read in reviews about people liking or disliking characters in a book but I don’t very often have that experience. So I was surprised to find myself really disliking the evil twin and having the dislike increase as the book moved along. I tried to give her extra credit for being differently abled but couldn’t quite manage that.

Never could you predict when that other Sharon – “Sherrill” – or was it “Starr Bright” – might emerge, cruel and funny.

JCO’s twins are multiple personalities in two bodies.

Lily supposed that, in the human brain, deep in the cortex of memory, there is no such thing as “time” – “chronology.” Everything is present tense, nothing is “past.” We may be numerous selves simultaneously. Adult, adolescent, child, infant. Was she six years old, sixteen years old, thirty-six years old? Shrewdly she guessed that no one was ever older than his or her actual age, in dreams. Because you can’t yet remember,
, . .
I am Rose of Sharon Donner, you are Lily of the Valley Donner.
We can’t ever be lonely like other people. We have each other.

There is murder but there is no mystery. You know the killer. The intensity builds as you watch the horror story unfold in the mind of a killer. At the end it was a page turner for me. But it did make me a little more tense than I like to be. Now I have this headache in the back of my head.

JCO was not very successful with her pseudonyms. Her husband’s name was Raymond Smith, thus Rosamond Smith was invented. But she was found out almost immediately. Having two agents was not so cool. At least her primary agent didn’t think so.

Pronouncing herself surprised and very disappointed that her literary cover had been blown, Joyce Carol Oates said she would never again try to write a book under a pseudonym. She tried it this once, she said yesterday, because ''I wanted to escape from my own identity.''
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/05...

I should admit that I am a JCO fan and also evidently like Rosamond Smith. At least I liked this one quite a lot. I am still puzzling about the two endings back to back. It is fascinating to think that they might be dead in the first end. The second end of the daughter following in her (unknown) mother’s footsteps as both trite and fun at the same time. JCO can do that to me. Would we say the evil twin is psychotic and her sister is simply neurotic?

Although I have many more JCO books on my shelves to read and do not pretend to have a clear understanding of her voluminous work, I must reward her with four stars for this one and see what she comes up with next. I think some of her short stories are in my near future.

[Kurt Reichenbaugh]

A book about teenage victims, twins and murder in desert highway motels. Starr Bright is the name adopted by a troubled young woman who'd once been "the popular girl" who left town to become a famous model, leaving her plain and boring twin sister behind. Starr Bright's dream of fame and success falls hard against the men who exploit her and leave her behind, addicted and shattered. She then decides to pay them back, eventually returning to the place that started it all. Nothing earth-shaking or new here. Still it's a good book. I particularly liked the ending.

[Mandy]

Another entertaining psychological thriller from Joyce Carol Oates writing as Rosamond Smith. In this one Lily Merrick’s safe suburban life is upended by the sudden arrival of her twin sister Sharon after a fifteen year absence. The opening scene of the novel sets the stage for later events and it’s obvious that things aren’t going to end well. It’s a fun read, often insightful, and quite tense at times, a tension that Smith manages to maintain right to the end. Enjoyable.

[Pieter]

Hey, I know this is by no means great literature, but for what it was (a pulp style thriller)it certainly achieved it objective and was an enjoyable read. I think many people have rated it lower than it deserves because it was written by Joyce Carol Oates, and while it certainly isn't one of her best novels, it still hits it's mark. This is JCO having fun with the trashy genre and not having to live up to her reputation!

[Sherice]

First Joyce Carol Oates book I have read. Really good. Evil twin! Classic yet unique!

[Jessica]

After reading her most recent release (DIS MEME BER), I had to get some more of Joyce Carol Oates' books. I came across STARR BRIGHT WILL BE WITH YOU SOON and it immediately piqued my interest. A female serial killer, the classic good twin vs bad twin, what's not to like?

We follow Sharon. Sharon is beautiful but has an awful history with men. She moved out to Las Vegas and went by the name Starr Bright as an exotic dancer. One night, after she is caught trying to steal his wallet, the man she spent a night with mercilessly beats her and rapes her. Sharon finally snaps. She goes on a killing spree - leaving behind a bloody trail of carved-up men in cheap motel rooms from coast to coast. She works her way to her twin sister, Lily's, house in upstate New York. The estranged sisters haven't seen each other in 15 years, and Lily and her family are more than willing to help her troubled sister find a new start.

It was so interesting to read this book from the different perspectives. We go through Sharon's eyes and Lily's. The complete differences between the twins is so evident, especially when it comes to their mental state. Sharon is slowly spiraling out of control throughout the whole story while Lily's chapters were very collected and coherent. It was so different knowing who the serial killer was right away, unlike all other thrillers, we didn't have the investigation or trying to find the killer along with police. The reader knows right away.

I love the twist on the good twin and bad twin classic. Joyce Carol Oates did a phenomenal job making all of these situations so realistic. From the problems between the sisters, to the murders, and the tragic spiral of Sharon's mental state. Starr Bright is about to strike again, and this time, a long harbored vengeance is the motive.

I would definitely recommend this to someone that wants a good, realistic serial killer story. However, be warned, if you don't want to read the graphic rape portion, then this might not be for you.

I give this 4/5 stars!

Thanks to Netgalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review!

[Alison C]

When Sharon (full name Rose of Sharon) and her twin sister Lily (of the Valley) are growing up with their preacher father and homemaker mother, she was always in the limelight, while Lily hung back, shy and unassuming. Nobody is too surprised when Sharon becomes high-fashion model Shirelle, for her beauty and talents were always obvious to all; meanwhile, Lily marries an unassuming man and makes a living working part-time as a pottery instructor while raising her daughter Deidre (known as Deedee). After an absence of 15 years, Sharon shows up at Lily’s home in up-state New York, bereft and ailing. She keeps talking about Starr Bright, the small-town media personality who started Sharon on her glamorous life; only Starr Bright seems to be somebody else entirely now…. I love Joyce Carol Oates’s work; she has a way of getting into the heads of her characters like no one else can, and her stories, while often horrific, are rooted in the deeply and richly imagined psychological life of those characters. I’ve read more of her short stories than her novels, but when I ran across this e-book omnibus called Double Trouble and containing two novels (this one, from 1999, and “Soul/Mate” from 1989) along with two short stories (“The Murderess” and “An Unsolved Crime”), I couldn’t resist. I’ll get to the second novel later, but for now will recommend “Starr Bright” wherever you may find it; it’s a very dark, very disturbing and very well-written (with some strong language) plunge into the mind of what one might consider a psychotic sociopath. Recommended!

[AgentChesterDesmond]

I bought this as part of the Double Trouble collection off the strength of both the Joyce Carol Oates name (I had never heard of Rosamond Smith) as well as the Hard Case label. Unfortunately, I could not penetrate the story of Starr Bright further than its surface level. There is something about how the prose is written, that whilst I guess it is technically excellent, it makes reading this story more difficult than it ought to be. Something like this needs to flow, and Starr Bright flows like treacle, especially when we hop from the sleaze of Vegas to the boring nothingness of suburbia.

In a way, the story of Starr Bright reminds me a lot of the extremely graphic exploitation movie The Toolbox Murders, where (spoiler alert) all the murders happen at the start of the movie and the rest of the film is spent at a boring snail pace as the characters piece together who committed such heinous acts. The same thing happened here; the novel starts off strong as Starr flits from man to man on her quasi-religious murderous path, but the transition to the sister she left behind is so dry and boring that after 135 pages, I realised that I simply did not care enough about what had fucked Starr up so bad that she felt compelled to start ritually killing sleazeball dudes all over the USA. I’m not saying that a novel needs to be drenched in sex and violence to be appealing, but the plot of Starr Bright was just not interesting enough for me.

It’s a shame, because if this read a little better you could put this down in a few days, easily, like any other great crime thriller.

[Sloane TVBand]

3.5/5

I found the prose in this book exciting. Lots of long paragraphs, many over a page in length. Artful uses of adverbs. The contents of conversations are frequently described without sharing much of the actual dialogue.

Even ignoring the rule-breaking stuff the language is evocative and smart. I'm excited to read more Joyce Carol Oates in the future.

The book has a less remarkable plot. This is a story where it's all about how it's told, because this could've been a salacious Lifetime movie. Granted, that could be said of a lot of great suspense stories, but it's still true nonetheless. It also needs to be said that the ending is a bit of an anticlimax.

Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon is a solid read that I enjoyed a lot. The prose inspired me as a writer. That being said, I can't help but wonder if I would've received the same inspiration and a better story had I read a different book by Oates.

[Note: Read this as part of the Hard Case Crime Double Trouble volume, not as a stand-alone book.]

[Redwell]

Joyce Carol Oates' book Zombie allowed me to see the world through the eyes of a sociopath. It put me in the headspace of someone without reason, without feeling, without humanity. Her pulpier serial killer book committing to a diagnostic of a three dimensional character presents an interesting counterpoint. It's her mass market paperback which considers sexual trauma, religious delusion, substance abuse, economic incentive, and the like. The violence in one book was random and pointless while the violence in this one makes perfect sense.

It's a shame we didn't get a 90s film adaptation of this. It would've landed somewhere between The Hand That Rocks The Cradle and Raising Cane. Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore would have been perfect as the sisters. JT Mollner's recent film Strange Darling is a consolation prize I suppose. More or less.

[Starr Baumann]

I hesitate to write this because I don't like to leave negative reviews for authors. I know how hard it is to write a book, and this author has been writing for long time. I liked this story but its execution... I didn't enjoy. I suspect Oates had garnered some attention by the time this was published, and perhaps she'd stopped taking the advice of her editor(s) by that point. The writing is hard to read. I don't want to spend time going over and over sentences to figure out their meaning. The placement of semicolons and the lack of needed commas are puzzling. I don't think I'll be spending any more time with a book by Oates.

[Audrey]

Stripper/hooker/washed-up-popular-girl facing religious psychosis decides to start seeking out and murdering "pigs"- men who have wronged her.

I'm not usually a fan of books about violent crimes, but I couldn't put this one down. I found the characters really well fleshed out and appreciated that they drew me in. This book reminded me a little bit of Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn (which I hated btw) in the atmospheric intrigue, but in my opinion this was way better done. The fractured and messy story-telling in the beginning from Sharon/Sherrill/Starr Bright's perspective was honestly a bit chilling.

[Andrew]

3.5 stars

I know this is JCO so expectations are high but you might have to factor in the genre here. As a Hard Case crime novel it works great and has a lot of tension but probably not what you might used to reading by her.
Lily and Sharon work great as a pair - opposite but connected in so many ways. They are both viscerally realized characters. I always enjoy these gritty crime novels and this was no different.

[Shanna Williams]

The end left me hanging, which I really did not like.

[Paul]

Fun to read a psychological thriller from JCO’s pseudonym. A good but uneven fantasy of revenge and justice.

[Brad]

Spooky revenge novel that is so satisfying to read. Starts a little slow but she's a master at the craft

[AC]

DNF - read 40%. Not sure why, but not working for me. Shrug…

[Egghead]

trauma is a rock
thrown into a glass window
cracks go on and on

[Joanne]

actual author Joyce Carol Oates

The root of this novel’s theme is good twin / bad twin. Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley are twin sisters with a reverend father and the notable Bible passages are infused throughout the novel. Lily is the good one (pure white like the flower) and Sharon aka Starr Bright is the bad one (red roses equaling blood). Approaching her late 30’s, Sharon’s modeling and dancing career have ended. Her glamorous life big city life is a past memory. She is now on a mission to seek revenge of all the men who have wronged her in her life. While you know early on where the story is headed, it is a physiological thriller and Sharon’s killing sprees are a cry for help. Arriving back home to her sister and country roots in upstate New York, she blends into Lily’s normal family life, but still carries out her evil misconduct. Sharon’s revenge is endless and vengeance prompted towards high school boys who wronged her in bygone days. A creepy tale in that the deaths were descriptively detailed, but an intriguing story to keep you reading anticipating an unexpected twist at the end.

[The Wee Hen]

When I started this book I was under the impression that it had been inspired by Aileen Wuornos and, for a moment, I was just a bit disappointed when Rose of Sharon/Starr Bright/Sherrill turned out to be a different sort of customer than Aileen was. Our protagonist is wounded young woman in the body of a middle-aged former model, now stripper who has been "run to earth" by God and believes herself to be, in fact, the very hand of God. She's on a cross-country killing spree and she must end it in her hometown.
Rounding the book out is our murderer's twin sister, Lily of the Valley, quite comfortably living out her quiet, unassuming life back in their hometown. Lily has a lovely husband and a sweet, charming daughter, teetering on the precipice of love, boys and life.
Guess who blows into this delicately balanced family to burn it all down?
This is a seering page-turner. Rose and Lily are both painstakingly sketched and, shockingly, both are easily sympathetic to the reader. Wonderful book!

[Pam]

Twin sisters Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley haven't seen each other in over fifteen years when suddenly Sharon shows up at Lily's home in the town where they were born and raised.

The girls are not identical and couldn't be more different. Lily is married with a daughter, is well respected and highly thought of in her community. She is domestic, loving, kind, and giving. She always took the back seat attention-wise to her much prettier sister, Sharon. Sharon has been through the wringer. She's been a dancer, a stripper, and a thief. Sharon hasn't had a place to call home as she is constantly on the road. She has many, many deep and dark secrets...as does Lily.

This book had me on the edge of my seat. There is constant tension brewing. JCO has plenty of surprises, shocks, twists, and turns in store for her readers. This is a dark, vicious, brutal psycho thriller.

I loved it!!!!

[Stephanie]

Star bright will be with you soon was a confusing but intriguing tale. There was plenty of moments where I was wondering what will be happening next but feeling disappointed when I actually found out what was happening. Rosamond Smith a.k.a. Joyce Carol Oates takes you want an interesting tale of two twin sisters one having a normal suburban life the other one being a stripper/serial killer. Though the description of the book may have you believe it is a murder mystery you know who the murderer is an exactly why she's murdering the man she is the mystery truly is; what is this a erratic person going to do next. I enjoyed going through the journey that is the storyline of this book but found ending to be less than desired.

[Jim]

HATED the ending... just didn't fit with the story, at least as i was reading it... sometimes JCO seems to write too formulaic, like she writes what is expected as opposed to what she wants to write... she is talented, does dread and creepy and emotional and urgent and sad and powerful extremelt well, but at times it seems to me she lacks authenticity... or maybe lacks somehting else... this could have been different and, in my mind, better...

[Stephen B.]

This book is wild, takes a bit to get used to, but it’s worth the investment in time. You’re in good hands when Joyce Carol Oates tells the story, so allow yourself to get carried away with the tale as it flows.

Not for everyone, and I admit that I bought it because of the $2.00 price on the Kindle sale. But I’ll again turn to Oates’ nom de plume, Rosamond Smith, for a thrilling page-turning ride.

[Paulette Illmann]

I am used to reading Joyce Carol Oates when she is not using a pseudonym, and this was so different from her usual style, I couldn't seem to adjust. The story was gripping. You wanted to keep turning pages to see where it went, but to me, it seemed to break off abruptly, leaving far too much to the imagination.

[Courtney]

Identity. Doppelganger. This is Joyce Carol Oates's pseudonym.