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 Snake Eyes
by Joyce Carol Oates
New York: Dutton, 1992
280 pages
Dust Jacket Blurb
It is a tattoo—only a tattoo. A tattoo of a serpent with a human face on the sinewy arm of Lee Roy Sears, a convicted killer whose death sentence has been commuted to life imprisonment, thanks to the intervention of an idealistic young lawyer, Michael O'Meara. Now, ten years a model prisoner, Lee Roy has been paroled. Inevitably, he heads for Mount Orion, an affluent suburb in New Jersey, where the O'Mearas—Michael and his wife, Gina—make their home.
If Lee Roy Sears seems to represent all that is dark and twisted in humanity, Michael and the exquisitely lovely Gina stand for all that is sunlit and bright. They have success, social position, a wonderful marriage, a pair of perfect twins as their children. and now they have Lee Roy Sears in their lives as well, as they seek to nurture the artistic genius he has shown in prison and to heal the scars of social injustice.
Thus the stage is set for a drama that on the surface seems to echo the fearful fable of the Garden of Eden. Step by step, seduction by seduction, Lee Roy Sears turns the O'Mearas' heavenly happiness into a hellish nightmare. But on a deeper level, it is not Lee Roy, this human embodiment of monstrous malevolence and animal appetite, who alone bears the guilt. For it becomes inescapably clear that Lee Roy is the key that releases demons caged within the upright lawyer and his ideal wife, as he reopens wounds hidden but unhealed within Michael and stirs Gina's secret, searing hungers.
In this extraordinary thriller a miasma of evil hovers over every page, gathering startling dread and eroticism, and hurtling the plot toward a devastating climax. Rosamond Smith has never been in better form.
Excerpt
 The man is a madman.
A murderer?
No. These are works of the imagination. Fantasies.
Perhaps he put them there deliberately, to test me?
As, dreaming, we are the dreams we dream, and cannot escape from them except by the metaphysical impossibility of becoming someone other than ourselves, so too Michael O'Meara, on that appalling occasion, found himself behaving as if—almost!—nothing were wrong. Rising shakily to his full height, leaning for support on the edge of a table; and, in the process, nearly knocking over a bottle of turpentine into which paint-stiffened brushes had been thrust. He saw too, though not with much awareness, a curious sort of razor-instrument, for what function he couldn't guess—it looked as if a razor blade had been secured by layers of adhesive tape to the handle of a broken paintbrush. The blade glinted, sharply.
Epigraph
It has been said unto you, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That you resist not evil.
All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.
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Reviews
- Booklist, November 1, 1991, p476
- Kirkus Reviews, November 15, 1991, p1431
- Library Journal, December, 1991, p200
- Publisher's Weekly, December 13, 1991, p44
- Detroit News & Free Press, January 26, 1992, P, 9
- San Francisco Chronicle Review, January 26, 1992, p3
- Armchair Detective, Spring, 1992, p231+
- Washington Post Book World, March 1, 1992, p4
- Atlanta Journal Constitution, March 15, 1992, N, 10
Other Editions
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Page address:
http://jco.usfca.edu/works/novels/snake.html
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