A Fair Maiden Book

An Otto Penzler Book

Sixteen-year-old Katya Spivak is walking with her two summer babysitting charges in Bayhead Harbor, New Jersey, when she’s approached by silver-haired courtly Marcus Kidder—a local resident of some renown. At first his interest in Katya seems innocent, even as Katya’s interest in him seems precociously manipulative. His lovely oceanside home, the children’s books he has written, his classical music, and his lavish presents to her—Mr. Kidder’s life contrasts starkly with Katya’s working-class—and marginally criminal—family background. By almost imperceptible degrees, the relationship between Katya and the gentlemanly Marcus Kidder changes, and posing for him isn’t the romantic endeavor it had seemed. What does this mysterious rich man really want from Katya, who is young enough to be his granddaughter? And what will he risk to get it?

In the tradition of Oates’s classic novella Beasts, A Fair Maiden is an unsettling, ambiguous tale of mounting suspense and gradually unfolding horror.

The Washington Post - Jane Smiley

Oates's world is our world: crass at best and vile at worst, and American to the core. But we keep returning, and we do so for the same reason I went on with A Fair Maiden—not because Marcus and Katya are winning or even enlightening, but because Oates's ability to plot is like no other writer's. It's as if she has a direct channel to the reader's mind. Just when the novel or story becomes too disagreeable (or too true, depending on your view of things) to continue with, she offers a little twist of action or motivation that turns a few more pages, and the reader wonders all over again, how did she think of that?