Joyce Carol Oates, the prolific novelist, playwright, poet and critic, has never been afraid to explore the darker side of the human psyche. At a recent interview at San Francisco's City Arts and Lecture Series, she talked about her most recent novel, "Zombie," which is told from the perspective of a serial sex killer. A collection of her short stories, "Will You Always Love Me and Other Stories," will be published by Dutton in February.

Was it difficult for you as a writer to imagine the voice of a serial killer? How were you able to do this so effectively?

Earlier I had envisioned the serial killer standing in front of an audience, and it would be like a theatrical, dramatic monologue. The human voice, and the ways in which the human being expresses him or herself in the theatrical setting, is very interesting to me. Often people standing in front of an audience say things and reveal things about themselves that they would never even dream of revealing in a more intimate situation. Nor would they think of these things if they were alone. There's some strange -- perhaps it's an atavistic -- response, maybe it's not understood at all.

I don't have any problem with that. Most of the difficulty I have is with the form. To find the sentence, the unit of speech, and how long or how short should the chapter be. Should the novel be in three parts or two parts? Should it have an epilogue and a prologue? All my work is very architecturally structured.

But the actual people in my novel like the Zombie, and any other people I have written about, they seem to be very real, and I don't feel that I have to invent them. It's like there's a pulse beat, then I get on the pulse, and then the person speaks.

Who was the "inspiration" for the serial killer in "Zombie"? Was he modeled after Jack the Ripper?

No, I don't really know much about Jack the Ripper. When I lived in the Detroit area in 1976, I taught at the University of Detroit and I had a whole lifetime of living in Michigan -- you can get a whole lifetime very quickly living in Detroit, just a few years there adds up to a long time -- but I was living there and there was a serial killer who began to operate in the very affluent northern suburbs of Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and Franklin Hills. Altogether, he took about eight young teenagers and children, sometime in broad daylight. They'd be missing for several days, and each caused an uproar of hysteria and terror. He was never apprehended.

I had wanted to write a novel about the terror and the despair of living in the community where this was going on and being so helpless. But time went on, and months went by, and finally, he simply ceased to operate, and nobody knows whether he just left and went to some other part of the country. Probably not, because he would have continued -- serial killers rarely stop, they just keep on going until something happens, and usually they make some mistake.

I started writing the novel, but it was about the community and the families, and it never seemed to be quite satisfactory. So I just threw out the manuscript, and then some years later I was invited by the New York Review of Books to write an essay on the literature of serial killers. So I read about 35 books altogether, including Ann Rule's classic, "The Stranger Beside Me," which is about Ted Bundy, and is really a remarkable book.

Ted Bundy is actually -- this sounds a little bizarre -- less realistic in terms of the serial killer profile than my Zombie. My Zombie is much more representative. Though I think of him as a real person and he has his own unique identity, he fits the profile much more than Ted Bundy did, who was so charming, so intelligent. He was a law student for a while, active in the public and politics, sort of free enterprising, you know. A serial killer is the ultimate Darwinian, after all. It's a free market kind of thing.

One of the classic serial killers is of course Jack the Ripper -- he's the archetype of the male, the misogynist, who takes his revenge against the female. It's almost like a figure out of mythology. Men have traditionally liked those figures -- they stand for the repressed or the buried hostilities that quite normal men feel toward women. It's probably not abnormal to have these feelings -- and Jack the Ripper is kind of the archetype.

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