To achieve such a feat he attempts a psychosurgical procedure known as transorbital lobotomy that he finds described and illustrated in an old medical textbook. Saying `Yes, Master & No Master.' He would kneel before me lifting his eyes to me saying `I love you Master. Quentin's aspiration, as he notes in his diary, is to create a zombie, a being with no memory who would be his slave forever.

'I love you, don't make me hurt you,' he pleads as he begins his grisly procedure, and his victim, helplessly bound and gagged, suddenly realizes his fate and starts his last desperate struggle. They attest to the affection Quentin feels for those he remembers as 'Bunnygloves,' 'Rooster,' 'Big Guy' and 'Squirrel.' Mementos of these encounters include a bracelet of braided hair (his and a victim's) and a body part (not identified) preserved in a bottle of formaldehyde. (Oct.Not a very close watch, it seems, because their subject remains an elusive sociopath, a sadist who preys on young men, luring them with clever tricks into his van and, later in his basement, torturing them and attacking them sexually as they are dying, then stashing their bodies in remote graves.

This slim, sadistic reverie may be chilling, but it comes off as less a fully realized work than as an exercise from a writer at morbid play.

Convincingly presented as Quentin's diary of his pursuit of the perfect ''zombie'' (a handsome young man to be rendered compliant and devoted through Quentin's lobotomizing him with an ice pick), the narrative incorporates crude drawings and typographic play to evoke the hermetic imagination of a psychopath the reader examines the killer's sketches of weapons and staring eyes, and hears him say, ''I lost it & screamed at him & shook him BUT I DID NOT HURT HIM I SWEAR.'' For all its apparent authenticity, however, this novel ventures into territory that has been explored more powerfully by, among others, Dennis Cooper (Frisk), whose chilly minimalism underscores the brutality of such crimes in a way that Oates's more calculatedly histrionic approach does not. It depicts the career of Quentin P., a convicted young sex offender on probation who has turned to serial killing without being caught, despite the worried scrutiny of his family and of his psychiatrist. Coming on the heels of last year's excellent What I Lived For, this depressing narrative carries macabre imagination to the extreme. Periodically, Oates seems compelled to write grim novels that explore humanity's darkest corners.

Zombie by Joyce Carol Oates