Man Crazy

Joyce Carol Oates has illuminated the dark mysteries of the human soul as few writers have. Now, in her stunning new novel, she embraces its resilience. Man Crazy is Oates's most moving and redemptive work yet—a story that gives voice to the secret testimonies of the heart . . . that filters truth through the distorted lens of memory . . . that reveals the terrifying power of love to destroy and ultimately, to make whole again.

At five, Ingrid Boone loved her father with all the innocence and blind trust of childhood, believing him when he told her they would fly away in his favorite plane someday. But Ingrid's young life is shattered when this affectionate, violent man who learned to kill in Vietnam abandons her and her beautiful young mother in the wake of a violent crime. That is the day an essential truth vanishes from Ingrid's life.

Fleeing to a small mountain community, Ingrid grows up in isolation and learns not to ask questions when her mother takes up with a string of faceless men. Her only solace is the blissful daydream in which she and her father soar through the skies in his plane—an image that will continue to tantalize and torment her. Desperate to recapture this lost love, hungry for any kind of mercy at a man's hand, Ingrid allows boys and men to abuse her, searching for affection in the alcohol, drugs, and sex they offer.

But it is with Enoch Skaggs, the charismatic leader of a murderous satanic cult, that Ingrid reaches the depths of degradation—and witnesses something she shouldn't have seen. Yet it is in her blackest moment of despair—when she is marked for death—that Ingrid finds unexpected salvation . . . and the will to reclaim her life and her heart again.

As she explores our eternal craving for love and the devastating effect of its loss, Joyce Carol Oates takes us to a new level of understanding of the desires that propel our lives. Filled with luminous, haunting imagery and rich emotional intensity, Man Crazy is a profoundly affecting tale of love, reconciliation, and hope. The kind of novel we've come to expect from a voice that is like no other in contemporary American literature, this is Joyce Carol Oates's finest achievement.