A collection of darkly psychological tales from literary legend Joyce Carol Oates, where horror lurks not in monsters, but in human minds, desires, and the quietly crumbling boundaries of self. Each story exposes a different facet of dread—emotional, existential, and at times, physical.
A gifted young philosophy student sets out to seduce her revered mentor, only to discover that intellectual power games can turn disturbingly predatory. In another tale, teenage girls exact brutal, surgical revenge on the predators in their midst—punishment born of rage and terrifying clarity. A woman haunted by the presence of a stalker may be placing her trust in the wrong man, while a new mother becomes morbidly fixated on the grotesque transformation of her body and identity.
In the centerpiece of the collection, a famed writer obsessively drafts multiple versions of his suicide, blurring art and death in a descent that’s as coldly calculated as it is emotionally devastating.
With clinical precision and an eye for the terrifying subtleties of human behavior, Oates crafts stories that leave readers unsettled long after the final page. Zero-Sum is not conventional horror—it’s something colder, sharper, and more intimate. It’s horror from the inside out.
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