Another Joyce Carol Oates? Yes and no. Strictly speaking it's Rosamond Smith, a pseudonym Oates used between 1987 and 2001. And yes, it's another Joyce Carol Oates because it is not possible to have too much of Joyce Carol Oates because she has written so much - and is still writing, more than sixty years after her first novel - and her range is so vast that there has to always be something that appeals. And there will be more Joyce Carol Oates on this blog because this is only the first of four 'Smith' works (two novels and and two shortish stories) bundled together as Double Trouble in this magnificent new collection from Hard Case Crime, which I was eager to acquire as soon as it was published.
Starr Bright is the story of sisters Sharon and Lily, sisters doubly close in that they are near-identical twins but very different in personality. Sharon was always that little bit more eye-catching, Lily tending to fade into the background. Sharon dreams of stardom since her first public appearance on a local TV talent show for kids (featuring the eponymous 'Starr Bright') and heads for the big city at sixteen, returning only once to give birth to a daughter, whom Lily brings up as her own.
Dreams don't always come true. Now Sharon is nudging forty, losing her looks, and going to cheap motels with unpleasant men to pay the bills. Sharon and Lily are the daughters of a hellfire pastor - their names are actually Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley. Lily, having stayed home and married and brought up her sister's daughter and cared for her father in his years of long decline, has largely lost her faith. But Sharon, one night in one particularly skanky motel, is filled with a sense of fire and brimstone, and murders her client, painting stars on the wall and slogans about pigs dying in the victim's blood. She obviously steals his wallet and his car and thus starts on a career of murder across America.
Finally she turns up on Lily's doorstep, shattered and broken. She stays over for a few weeks, befriending her daugher Deedee (Dierdre of the Sorrows) though never letting on she is really her mother, flirting a little with Lily's husband Wes, and generally rediscovering her sister and rebuilding a relationship. Lily, of course, believes she is saving her sibling. But Sharon has one last mission, one final curtain-call for her demonic alter ego Starr Bright...
It is, of course, a fantastic book, a genuine psychological thriller. The amount of care Oates/Smith puts into her characters is astonishing, as is the depth of the backstory. Lethal though Sharon is, humdrum though Lily seems to be, we end up caring for them both. And it's not just the women, though they are the focus; Wes is the one who has to try and find a balance between the two of them and has a couple of brilliantly executed scenes.
By the way, if you're thinking that 'Rosamond Smith' seems a somewhat lame nom de plume, Oates's first husband and co-founder of The Ontario Review Inc which owns her copyright was Professor Raymond J Smith.
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