SOURCE: “Killer Kids,” in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XLIV, No. 17, November 6, 1996, pp. 16-20.

In the following excerpt, Oates sees Rhoda, the murderous child of The Bad Seed, as a precursor to a series of lethal children who have appeared in popular fiction and the movies since the 1950s.

First published in 1954, when it was an immediate and much-discussed best-seller, The Bad Seed has long been out of print and its eccentric author, William March, author of five previous novels and three short story collections, long forgotten. Popular culture swallows the creations of individuals and excretes them, so to speak, as autogenetic-mythopoetic figures: of those worldwide millions familiar with Frankenstein (that is, Dr. Frankenstein's unnamed creature) and Dracula, for instance, presumably only a small fraction know that these are literary creations, still fewer the names and identities of their authors. Popular culture has no memory, or...