Man Crazy: A Novel

Front Cover
Dutton, 1997 - Fiction - 282 pages
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.

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Contents

Section 1
3
Section 2
9
Section 3
33
Copyright

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About the author (1997)

Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16, 1938 in Lockport, New York. She received a bachelor's degree in English from Syracuse University and a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin. She is the author of numerous novels and collections of short stories. Her works include We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, Bellefleur, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, Because It Is My Heart, Solstice, Marya : A Life, and Give Me Your Heart. She has received numerous awards including the National Book Award for Them, the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literature. She was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction with her title Lovely, Dark, Deep. She also wrote a series of suspense novels under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith. In 2015, her novel The Accursed became listed as a bestseller on the iBooks chart. She worked as a professor of English at the University of Windsor, before becoming the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. She and her late husband Raymond J. Smith operated a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review.

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