The newest novel from Joyce Carol Oates, The Accursed, inducts the reader into the stifling high society of Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the last century—an interminable tea party where everybody who isn’t a vampire or a socialist is doing a lot of hard drugs. Woodrow Wilson is a trembling mess whose racist daymares can only be calmed with regular doses of opium. Upton Sinclair is threatening to dismantle America through serial muckraking. Everything except laudanum, hardcore Presbyterianism, and blueberry muffins is being actively repressed. (As Oates herself said last month, during a reading at Seattle’s Central Library, the world of this novel is “a sort of esoteric playground for Southern boys, where graduating seniors freed their personal slaves upon leaving.”) Those who preach fire and brimstone are revealed to be shameful cowards. Naturally, the only spiritual landscape befitting them is a haunted one, in a gothic novel from which God is notably absent.
The narrator is a heartbroken historian descended from an old Princeton family—the van Dycks—and the story he tells revolves around the richest, whitest family in Princeton, the Slades. Grandpa Slade is much loved, with a big family of beautiful children and an enviable public career as a minister and former governor. But Grandpa Slade is also hiding a nasty secret from his youth, and he can’t keep the resulting curse from systematically murdering his family in increasingly strange and disturbing ways…