With Shuddering Fall: A Novel

The first novel from New York Times-bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a thrilling, dark tale of family, revenge, and two souls intertwined by love and violence—now back in print for fans of America’s most prolific storyteller.

Written when Joyce Carol Oates was in her early twenties, and first published in 1964, With Shuddering Fall is her powerful debut novel, the first of five new Oates reprints from Ecco.

Following the turbulent story of two lovers who discover themselves mortal enemies, the author explores the struggle for dominance in erotic relationships that has become a predominant theme in her work, as well as the perils of patriarchal inheritance, and the ripple-effects of emotional loss in adolescence.  The result is an unsentimental yet sympathetic rendering of a disastrous love affair in which hatred is nearly as powerful as love, and a yearning for destruction is an abiding and insatiable passion.

Discover what prompted the New York Times to compare this young writer’s debut to Shirley Jackson’s famous short story, “The Lottery.”  Readers looking for a place to start in Joyce Carol Oates’s vast catalogue will be intrigued by the sheer narrative force of the young author, and her willingness to anatomize the darkest recesses of humanity in a search for redemption and resolution.

"One of the excellent qualities of this novel by the talented young writer Joyce Carol Oates is an unswerving fidelity to its theme...Miss Oates knows how to surround this hard tale with a hard atmosphere of sky, birds, wind and conversation, as these hard people drive like stock cars, battered but charged with power, at each other head-on." - New York Times

"Not only does it foreshadow her later work, it is one of the best novels since Flannery O'Connor to show the link between violence and religion in American culture." - The Modern Novel