Tales of Poe

This is one of the reasons I’ll miss these RIG courses: being “forced” to return to the classics. Last semester I was treated to H.P. Lovecraft, somebody I’d always wanted to read but was too afraid to try (due to the language in which it was written). Edgar Allan Poe is another staple of the horror genre that I wanted to read, but never felt I had the brainpower for. Was I ever wrong!

I can’t critique the writer because of the decades that separate us—to do so would require me to read a lot more 1800s literature than I care to digest at this stage in the game (so much for a doctorate’s in 19^th Century Literature), but I can talk a bit about the stories I read and the psychos he introduced.

The Tell-Tale Heart

This is perhaps one of his best-known pieces of writing aside from The Raven. It’s a simple tale of a man who commits murder but just as he’s about to get away with it something drives him to confess. This fellow spends the entirety of the tale trying to convince us he isn’t crazy, but we don’t buy it. First off, he murders somebody over a disquieting physical feature, but then he’s driven to confession by an imaginary beating heart. What truly makes this guy a psycho though is his dedication to the cause. He spends an entire week peering into the old man’s bedchambers at midnight just to catch a glimpse of the eye. He does it so methodically, that it take him an hour just to maneuver his head through the crack in the door. I want to believe that on the eighth night, he intentionally woke the old man up to quicken deed. It’s a great read, and is fantastically written in a tempo that denotes a spiraling madness.

The Black Cat

Psychos abuse pets, right? Who knew that Poe was so cutting edge? This is a tale of a kindhearted man who loves animals more than people, but who finds himself growing meaner as he gives into alcoholism. He becomes so mean as to begin to abuse the pets he so loves until finally one day he kills his favorite beast—a pure black cat that his wife jokingly thinks is a witch. It should be noted that he also plucked out its eyeball with a penknife at some point in the recent past. That’s when the madness begins… or is it madness at all? The line is blurred this man’s house burns down (leaving a strange silhouette of a hanging cat on the one standing wall) . Of course, he feels he regrets the cat murder, and goes about searching for a replacement. But why? Is it guilt? It seems to be, but when he finally finds a replacement the cycle begins anew. Now, this guy is obviously a psycho, but it also seems like Poe added a supernatural element. When the man murders his wife because she gets in the way of him killing the replacement cat (which looks a lot like his first one), he boards her up in the wall and the cat disappears. Then the police come and he (like our “hero” in The Tell-Tale Heart) about gets away with it before he bangs on the wall he buried her in. The cat starts howling from INSIDE THE WALL! Was it always in there? Was it really a cat, or are black cats really witches in disguise and this one was out to get revenge… or better yet, was it the original cat/witch back for revenge?

The Cask of Amontillado

So this one I loved! Primarily because the psycho got away with it. My only question? Why! The story hints at centuries of murder in our MC’s family to bolster the walls and crevices of their wine cellar, but the victim didn’t make a whole lot of sense. He said it was his friend, but his friend appeared to be a jester of some kind (his hat had bells and was cone shaped… I’m not a 19^th century Italy expert, but I saw court jester…), and he had was rich. But the narrative him luring his victim to his death, and goading him on with the “threat” of seeking another expert’s opinion on the voracity of a bottle of wine was entertaining.

Overall:

Poe had a keen sense when it came to pacing, and he didn’t write anything other than the what the story demanded. Yes, his language is dated, but even by today’s standards his stories seem concise and get to the point rather quickly.

Of course, that’s just the three stories I’ve read for this assignment, and his bibliography demands my attention moving forward. In fact, I think I’m going to return to his stories now…

The Killing Joke

Written by: Alan Moore

Illustrated by: Brian Bolland

Here’s a psycho that knows how to have a good time! In all fairness, he’s the only one in my reading this semester that fell into a chemical waste runoff pond (likely) after losing his wife that morning to a freak baby bottle heater accident (maybe). In this classic graphic novel we get a glimpse into the Joker’s background, though it’s revealed near the end that it’s probably not wholly accurate.

“Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another.”

We get that line after seeing the creation of Batman’s nemesis through a series of flashbacks. It’s a revelation that was without controversy, as the Joker’s origin has been famously vague since his inception. And while getting the real skinny on his creation is never likely to happen, many I’ve talked to or read about believe this to be the closest to reality. But, in the end, it’s just a story not unlike the ones Heath Ledger told during his turn as the Clown Prince in The Dark Knight.

And I think that’s the point of this book. We’ve read a lot books with psychos this semester, and seen a couple movies, but this one points out a what those glazed over: We never know what will drive somebody over the edge. Is it nature? Nurture? Is the Joker a born psycho or did he just snap one day like Michael Douglass in Falling Down (a movie I saw as a kid but makes way more sense as an adult)?

The Killing Joke isn’t your kid’s comic book. There are serious themes explored, and a vital turning point in the Batman universe (the rise of Oracle when Barbara Gordon is paralyzed). We see a nude Commissioner Gordon paraded by circus folk to a rollercoaster of insanity, led by Joker. During the ride he’s exposed to graphic imagery of his just-shot daughter, bleeding and naked in his living room. All of this to prove a point: one bad day is all it takes to trigger a psychotic break.

But why? I think it’s the Joker’s way of justifying his existence. It’s his way to show the world that he wasn’t a bad guy, just a guy who had a really, really bad day. If it could happen to him, it can happen to us all. It’s not a plea to Gotham to accept him or to absolve him of acts, but a warning. It’s been said that all Joker wants is to watch the world burn. As long as the rational people outnumber the psychos, it’s not going to be easy for him to set it ablaze. If he can show the people of Gotham that their beloved police commissioner can crack, what does that do for their tenuous grip on reality?

I don’t  think this book is groundbreaking or amazing or even excellent, but it is a good, if not great, addition to the Batman universe. It gives a level of depth to the Batman mythos that takes it beyond the comic book and into a cultural icon. Yes, it was one before this, but this book is the Batman book that reminds us that his world is dark and filled with monsters as dark as any that exist in ours.

Joyride, Jack Ketchum

And here it is! My favorite part of the semester. The part where I get to crack a book that’s just going to take me on a wild ride for no other reason than to just have a good time. My first semester it was Jay Anson’s Amityville Horror. Then last semester it was Robert Malfi’s Snow. This semester it’s Jack Ketchum’s Joyride.

This is not a psychological tour-de-force. It doesn’t necessarily explore the deep workings of the human psyche. It is, however, a fast-paced thrill ride that that gives a reader an easy-to-digest book that requires little commitment.

When I say commitment, I mean brainpower. Mental bandwidth. This isn’t something that needs to be dissected, merely enjoyed.

And that’s what I did. I enjoyed it.

Unlike the psychos of our past readings, Wayne Lock is painted with wide strokes and lacks many of the nuanced details found elsewhere. He simply wants to kill. He wants to kill so bad, but he just can’t bring himself to do it.

Until he witnesses a murder himself, that is. It’s like somebody who grew up wanting to be a writer, and then meeting somebody who is one… the switch goes up and now that kid’s writing up a storm in his makeshift office.

But Lock doesn’t have a makeshift office. He just has a book that he’s filled with the names of people who’ve slighted him. And once he’s sees somebody do what he’s always wanted to do, that book is going to be put to good use. Eventually.

This is the first book about a spree killer we’ve read this semester. It was a nice change of pace from the well-organized serial killers of the past few books and movies (except you, Pat Bateman) to just go on this little car ride with Lock.

And, of course, the people he witnessed commit a murder. But now they’re his witnesses! He kidnaps Lee and Carole, whom he witnessed kill her abusive husband just a couple of days before. They were his trigger, his inspiration.

Unfortunately, they aren’t the cold-blooded killers he thinks they are. They did it out of desperation because Carole’s soon-to-be-ex just wouldn’t stop intruding on their lives. Plus, he was a monster in his own right, cutting and raping Carole as if he owned her. No, they aren’t stone-cold killers, but he kidnaps them thinking they are so they could all have some fun together. That doesn’t really work out, though.

After his first kill, Wayne is thrown into a frenzy. I said before he wasn’t like our other organized killers, but he is organized. His route is planned out. He even has hotel reservations. Like a lot of spree killers, his choice of weapons is a gun, but he varies his MO a couple of times to keep the cops off his trail. It doesn’t really work, but hey, points for trying.

So what makes this guy a psycho? What traumatic event(s) in his past made him this way? Ketchum gives him the quintessential abusive parents angle, and even squeezes in an Oedipal complex for good measure. But the background felt shoe-horned, as if Lock had to have that background to be who he was. And I think that’s my major point of contention with the book: Wayne Lock could have just been a crazy sonofabitch and that would have made him scarier. Spree killers are scary like that, because everyone’s a target for no reason. So don’t give him a reason.

This book was definitely a lighter read than past entries, but I liked it. It was book candy, and it satisfied my sweet tooth.

Seven, Directed by David Fincher

Starring: Morgan Freeman, Brad Pitt, and Gwyneth Paltrow

I remember watching Seven when it first came out. I don’t remember the where or the circumstances under which I saw it (was it at a theater? On VHS? HBO?), but I remember nearly every detail of every scene. It was a dark, violent movie then, and it’s a dark, somewhat tame by today’s standards film now. The idea seems slightly cliché now: A serial killer who chooses and displays his victims based on the Seven Deadly Sins. From Gluttony to Wrath, each sin was delivered in such a deliciously stylized way as to be both obvious and cryptic. If displayed on their own, without the accompanying text, would they immediately be seen for what they are?

And that’s my only true problem with the movie. Does John Doe hold such contempt for the world around him that he sees it as necessary to label each kill? I think the film and the crimes themselves would be far stronger without telling us what each murder is supposed to represent. Then again, would we figure it out after only two murders without that help? Perhaps we are the dullards John Doe suspects us to be.

Kevin Spacey’s performance as John Doe is very good. I can’t take that away from him. He delivers his lines well and is just creepy enough for us to know that he’s the killer, no need to look elsewhere. It’s as if his performance was built to make us not look anywhere else… especially in the box. “Look at me! Look at me!” It’s an obvious sleight of hand to allow the filmmakers an opportunity to deliver the unexpected.

And it works, of course. If you’ve never seen the movie, then the ending is just twisty enough to draw a gasp and a “Damn, I should’ve seen that coming.”

But it all plays into John Doe’s attempt to deliver a message. What message is that? That this world is drowning in sin. Doe sees himself as a messenger to help awaken the world to its plight. There’s a discussion in the car while our heroes, Detectives David Mills and William Somerset drive the recently surrendered Doe into the middle of nowhere to find the last two bodies. That discussion is about Doe’s sanity and the role he’s played. Is he a messenger from God, or is he just crazy? And will anybody remember him a couple of months down the road? Mills writes him off as insane, but Doe has a trick up his sleeve that will most likely keep the world talking long after the crimes have ended.

But that’s another problem with Doe’s MO. He’s probably correct in thinking he’ll be discussed for years to come, but in what regard? The world will see him as smart for his plan, but they’ll also see him as Mills does: a loony that just happened to win.

It’s an ending we probably should have seen coming for awhile. Gwyneth Paltrow has just enough screen time for us to kind of care about her. We know she doesn’t like the city, but she wants to support her husband. The amount of screen time she’s given is a balance between noticeable and invisible, so that when the film’s final minutes unwind we are both shocked but not really saddened. It’s as if Fincher wants us to care about her, but not enough to create an emotional impact that takes away from the genius of John Doe’s plan.

Spacey’s portrayal of John Doe is an uncanny homage to Anthony Hopkins’ turn as Hannibal Lecter. Spacey channels the cannibal, from his cool demeanor to the way he speaks, and it would probably be so noticeable as to be distracting if he made an appearance any earlier in the film (well, an appearance in which we can see him or in which he delivers lines).

I think I’d like to see a sequel or take on this movie in which the Seven Cardinal Virtues are the killer’s inspiration, and he’s not doing it to show the world the error of its ways, but instead to see if it tears itself apart.

But, overall, this was a great movie, and fell perfectly in line with other crime procedural and psychological thrillers of the mid-90s, of which there were many. This one managed to stand out on the merits of its stars and fun ending.

Well, fun unless you're Gwyneth Paltrow.

Taxi Driver, Directed by Martin Scorsese

Starring Robert De Niro

Behold! One of the greatest films of all time, according to critics and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences! Robert De Niro! Jodie Foster! Harvey Keitel! Others!

I thought it just okay.

I’m not a psychologist, but I don’t think Travis Bickle fits the “psycho” label. Or at least to the degree as others on my reading/watching list for this semester. Maybe it’s because of his service in Vietnam, but I felt Bickle was less psycho and more traumatized. Here’s a man who spent three years in the Marine Corps, probably a good chunk of that time in Vietnam, and when he was discharged he was just set loose without the benefit of separation or psychological counseling. This is all stuff that’s common now, but to a soldier or Marine coming out of one of the most unpopular wars (that we arguably did not win), there was a severe sense of abandonment.

The U.S. government spent a lot of time and money turning military members into killers with no clear mission. Unlike wars before, where the mission was to preserve American freedoms, our servicemembers went to Vietnam with little more than propaganda to motivate their fighting. I’m not saying that all servicemembers were damaged and forgotten by the government, but in the case of this movie, that’s exactly what happened.

So, we have Travis Bickle, who probably suffers from some sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome, trying to find his way in the big city. That itself is a huge contrast from the jungles of Vietnam. He spent so much time fighting for something he didn’t understand, that when he comes home he can only see the filth and decay wrought by those fortunate enough not to do the same. I’ll say it, I’d be pissed and a little crazy too.

He was trained to be a hero, but Vietnam wasn’t a hero’s war; it was something uncertain and dirty and amorphous. When he came home, Bickle just wanted to fulfill the destiny that was promised to him.

He sees Betsy, the attractive campaign volunteer, being used the same way he was by politicians. So he attempts to free he from it. First, by trying to date her and convincing she’s being treated poorly. Is this his warning to her that he knows how it is to be treated unfairly by politicians? To be used for their gain? Am I reading too much into the film? Or not enough? If I write the rest of this in questions, will anybody notice?

Of course, their courtship ends abruptly when he takes her to an adult theater. Is it because he’s a psycho, or because his own midwestern innocence has been corrupted by the porn and prostitution so sought after in Vietnam? It’s easy to believe that he feels that sort of film is normal after being subjected to attitudes that condone it while serving oversees. I myself saw early on in my military career the normalization of porn and prostitution, two subjects I grew up feeling were taboo. Things have changed since then of course, but if I’d left the military after my first tour, would I have still believed them to be taboo, or would I have embraced them as normal for a short time following my discharge?

Betsy shuns him, so he takes it to the next level: kill the man who is enslaving her before she can be used further. That also fails so he goes after solving the greatest social injustice he’s aware of: the prostitution of a 12.5-old-girl. Jodie Foster, who was that age for the filming of the movie, was absolutely superb in her role. It would be easy to dismiss her as older than she actually was, just by her acting chops.

He knows he’s damaged going into the climax, but he also feels he’s on a mission as seen by his mohawk. Soldiers and Marines in Vietnam would often shave their heads or give themselves a mohawk before going on what they thought of extremely important, difficult missions. That comes across in this film, and is a nice touch on the part of the filmmakers, yet the reasoning is lost on a lot of new audiences. They just see it as a kooky move by Travis Bickle to show how crazy he really is.

But he isn’t crazy, not like the rest of the villains in this course. After the shootout, in which he takes out three baddies, he’s hailed a hero and returns to work as a cab driver. We see him return to a normal life as he knows it, but there is no sense that he’s still out for blood.

Was this a great film? Probably. Is it one that I love? No. Not because it wasn’t good, but because it’s not what it’s marketed as. It should be marketed as a war movie, not a psychological thriller. I will say it's a far better film than Jarhead, which arguabley had the same message.

Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, by Vincent Bugliosi

I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this blog. Do I write about the writing prowess of LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi (with a little help from Curt Gentry), or do I focus on the psychotic nature of its subject? I’m going to go with…

The Manson Family, a cult of hippies in the late 1960s. Everybody knows the story: In the summer of 1969, members of the Family murdered seven people over two nights in what is now referred to as the Tate-LaBianca murders. Everybody involved with Manson at the time was damaged. That’s my official diagnosis. From Susan Atkins, Leslie Van Houten, Patricia Krenwinkel, Mary Brunner, and Charles Watson to the rest living with Manson on his roaming communes, each one was searching for something. It might have been acceptance, love, or themselves. Whatever they were looking for, they found it with somebody possibly more damaged than themselves.

Charles Manson’s childhood, when taken by itself, is heartbreaking. An absent father, a mother more interested in men than her little boy, bouncing in and out of institutions. He makes a compelling case for the nature vs. nurture debate, and one must wonder if he would have been so desperate for acceptance if he’d had a different upbringing. As a writer, the Manson character makes for a good template to create a character from.

His behavior during the trial wavers on outlandish, and if I’d seen it in a book I’d probably feel it was forced by the writer. But, seeing that a real psychopath can unhinge and react like that under pressure should alleviate the concerns of many writers feeling they’ve written a character that acts out of character from time to time. We don’t see how Manson acted 100 percent of the time while with his Family, so we don’t know if this is just a one-time response to the trial, or a recurring trait. If this were fiction, I’d like to have seen a glimpse of that side of him at some point earlier in the story. It’s a telling side: a petulant child not getting his way. I think that harkens back to his childhood, which was more or less robbed form him by his mother. I would love to see a more in-depth analysis of Manson’s behavior (delivered in an interesting way… I don’t want to read a psychiatrist’s report).

There's an incredible amount of symbolism in this book, especially as it refers to the Beetles, but there's also a cold, real-world truth to it. Manson was out for petty revenge. Whether it was to recover money from a loan or to right the perceived wrongs of the world, Manson was as much thug as psycho.

This is the second book I’ve “read” as an audio book, and it was a conscious decision to do so. I bought the hardcover book (more about that below), but the more I thought about it, the more I felt this story needed to be told to me, out loud, to get through the forensics, police procedures and courtroom drama. And I felt it worked really well in that format. I have the hardcover to refer back to, and I’ll probably use it for reference, even if some of the material is dated (as far as investigative technology and procedures go). What isn’t dated is the way the human psyche bends under the will of charismatic persons, especially when both parties are damaged.

As an interesting note, I bought my hardcover copy second hand, and when I cracked it open, there was an address label belonging to the previous owner. Because it was so girly and flowery, I decided to look them up to see what kind of person would read a book like this, and tag it with such a pretty sticker. Eerily enough, this book belonged to a 92 year old woman who died in a house fire, and the book came from her estate.

There’s no evidence the book is haunted at this time. But that’s another RIG, and one I’ve done already.

Misery, by Stephen King

This is one of the first books I read by Stephen King. It was the early ‘90s, and while I didn’t catch the full extent of the underlying themes at the time (drug addiction, his own love/hate relationship with fans, his pending “retirement”), but I could tell this book was written from a place filled with pain and uncertainty. Reading it again, more than 20 years later, those feelings are more apparent.

Misery is beautifully written, which makes the fact he wrote it while coked to the gourd even more astounding. When King develops characters, he makes them real to the reader. They aren’t merely vessels to move the plot along, but people whose situation we genuinely care about. When you put two characters in a room together and set the entirety of your novel there, you’re bound to get to know them on a deeper level.

That’s what happens in Misery. It’s a claustrophobic tale that’s told from the POV of Paul Sheldon, and we see no more than what Paul sees. After some time, the reader begins to feel it is they that are bed and wheelchair ridden. I want to believe that Sheldon was fun for King to write because he didn’t have to worry about secondary, tertiary and… --quadriary? fourthiary?—characters. He became Paul Sheldon. But, sadly, Paul Sheldon isn’t the topic if this class. It’s Psychos. So let’s meet Annie Wilkes.

Annie Wilkes, Paul Sheldon’s Number One Fan, rescues him after a snowy car accident and brings him back to her house to mend. An unhinged woman, “solid all the way through, with no soul,” is an ex-nurse with a shadowy past (she turns out to be one of those angels of death nurses and loves to kill people and make it look like an accident). She’s also pissed because Pauly killed off her favorite heroine, Misery Chastain, so that he could turn his focus from gothic romance to “serious” literature. When she sees what he’s been spending his time working on, she forces him to burn it and replace it with a new Misery Chastain book just for her.

A lopped off foot and thumb later, and Sheldon finishes the book under duress. And he loves it!

But we spend so much time in Paul’s head, that we don’t really learn too much about Annie except through his descriptions. What we do know is that she loses her temper quickly, often blanks out, and has a laughing place. She would be a caricature of psychosis if King hadn’t created a well-sketched background for her. Through all her little proclivities and idiosyncrasies, Annie becomes not just evil incarnate, but an evil that just sees herself as just a little wonky. She

knows she’s evil, she just thinks it’s a personality quirk. Of course, we see through her scrapbook of horror (the second time I’ve gotten to use that phrase in as many months!), she’s been a little quirky for a long time.

From her colloquialisms to the way King describes her responses to Paul’s behavior (she goes blank mid-sentence, only to begin pick up where she left off minutes later), Annie Wilkes is about as well-developed a serial killer in fiction can get. There’s no real trigger in her background (which is pieced together over the course of the book, with one big data dump in the form of her photo album labeled “Memory Lane”), leaving the reader to realize that sometimes psychos are just born that way.

Silence of the Lambs

Directed by Jonathan Demme

Starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins

I’ve never met anybody that said they didn’t like Silence of the Lambs. Everybody has their favorite moments. Whether it’s Sir Anthony Hopkins making that fft-fft-fft sound, or Ted Levine tucking his manhood between his legs and dancing to “Goodbye Horses” by Q Lazzarus, there’s something for the whole family.

While the plot isn’t overly ambitious, and could have easily been done on any crime-of-the-week TV show, the direction of the film and the performances by its core cast created a film that transcends the average police procedural. The roles of Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter netted Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins each an Academy Award. The film also received Oscars for Best Film, Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. I note the awards as proof that a police procedural can not only be engaging, but artistic.

And also terrifying. While many people note the horrifying performance by Anthony Hopkins, I think it’s Ted Levine’s that was true genius. He played the antagonist, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, in such a nuanced way that each scene of his featured a different side of the character. I watched as Levine took us through the unassuming man with a broken arm, the vicious killer, the seemingly stoned man Starling meets at the door, and the tortured transgender who wants so desperately to be anything other than himself. There is a lot of imagery in this film, and one could argue that there’s too much. From moths to harvesting skin, to anagrams (which in itself is a clue as they portray a thing that isn’t what it appears to be), we’re all but spoon-fed the driving force behind Jame Gumb’s crimes.

But that’s just me over-analyzing. Nit-picking, if you will. Because I, like 95 percent of the people who rated it on Rotten Tomatoes, loved it. It was raw, gritty, smart, artistic and scary. We can all remember the way we felt the first time we saw a green-hued Clarice stumbling blindly through the dark while Buffalo Bill reaches out in a sick desire to touch her. Aside from that, I think it’s the only time I’ve ever hoped a dog would fall down a well.

But the breakout performance, the one that sticks out in everybody’s mind, is that of Anthony Hopkin’s portrayal of the cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lecter. So ingrained on our collective memories, is the image of a large, proper Englishman who loves nothing more than human liver and Chianti, that it’s difficult to picture anybody else playing him. It’s easy to forget that Lecter is of German descent, and should, by all accounts, have a German accent. When I first saw the TV series Hannibal, I was so turned off by the new take on the character I couldn’t get through the first episode. That’s all changed now, of course, and I find Mads Mikkelsen’s turn with the character very good (even if it’s more of a Dutch accent than German…).

Silence of the Lambs is about as close to cinematic perfection as one can get, and that is owing a lot to the cast, screenplay, and original source material by Thomas Harris. I mention the original author so late in my post because I touted his genius last week, and that part of me feels the success of this movie resulted in two less-than-worthy successors: Hannibal and Hannibal Rising.

So what is it about Lecter that people love in small doses, but find hard to, ahem, swallow, in large portions? I think a lot of it is the mysteriousness of his character in Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs. We are presented with a psycho that has been convicted of such heinous crimes, that they’ve become lore. He is the basis of the monster under our bed. He represents the worse that could happen to us if we become a census-taker.

But in larger roles, he becomes a caricature of a psycho. In short, Hannibal Lecter is scary because he isn’t understood. Hannibal Lecter is scary because we don’t want to know him.

Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris

Yes! A thousand times, yes! This is the book that The Sculptor wanted to be. It had absolutely everything the other book didn’t: Great procedural drama, three-dimensional characters, a sympathetic villain. It restored my faith in inhumanity after a mind-blowingly quick read.

Let me explain that last bit: I’m a notoriously slow reader, and it usually takes me about a week to finish a book, even one that I love. I completed this one in three days. Part of it was to get back on track to be ahead in my work, but I couldn’t have done it if it weren’t such a compelling read.

First, let’s clear the air about something: Hannibal Lecter makes an appearance in this book, but if you’re looking for a Silence of the Lambs level of participation, let me manage your expectations. He’s not really important to the story. He’s a plot device that could easily have been replaced with any other character. In fact, he’s not really fleshed out as the character he would later become. But that does not mean this book isn’t compelling or even wonderful. It’s a great read. And here’s why…

The psycho in this story is Francis Dolarhyde. Which is an unfortunate name for somebody with a speech impediment stemming from a cleft palate. Because he grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, this wasn’t something that was easily correctable at the time and he fell victim to being an unwanted child and ridiculed orphan. He was raised by his abusive grandmother who got her jollies by threatening to cut off his “little buddy.” Harris does a great job of setting Dolarhyde up as an unremorseful monster, and later breaks him down into a sympathetic antagonist. I love stories that do this. There’s nothing more rewarding when reading a book as rooting for both the antagonist and protagonist. Like most psychos in literature, his trigger is the emotional abuse he received as a child. We are introduced to him after the killings, but are given enough background about his life and his love of The Great Red Dragon paintings by William Blake. The reader grows with Dolarhyde as he struggles with his own transformation. He both fights it and embraces as he begins to fall for a blind film technician. It’s a less literal transformation as Buffalo Bill’s in Silence of the Lambs, but the theme exists across all of Thomas’ works.

Our protagonist, Will Graham, is a tortured, yet believably brilliant FBI special investigator (His gut isn’t a superhero, like in The Sculptor). He’s not an agent, as his past won’t allow him to be, but he’s invaluable to the FBI as a criminal profiler. He really knows how to get into the heads of the psychos (starting to see why he’s not an agent?). He’s not a psycho himself, but really empathic to their thought processes. But he’s built a life away from the Bureau, one that he’s happy in. They suck him back in to hunt the “Tooth Fairy,” (aka, Francis Dolarhyde, aka The Red Dragon). But what will he sacrifice? His happy life with his wife and stepson? His life? Both? The conflict built up regarding Will Graham’s marriage is nearly as well-written and engaging as his conflict with the Red Dragon.

Since 1975, Thomas Harris has only written six novels, five of which contain the Hannibal Lecter character. I say that, because reading this book and the others, as I have over the years, you get the sense that Thomas doesn’t necessarily relish in the story telling. He seems as tortured as Will Graham, reluctantly returning to the word processor because he’s encouraged to do so. That may or not be true, but like Graham, Harris is a genius in his field and I don’t think a larger bibliography would add anything to his mark on the art of popular fiction.

Thus, I read this book because it was assigned

The Sculptor

I spent more time on this in MS Paint and PowerPoint
than Greg Funaro spent on characterization and plot.

Gregory Funaro

I remember growing up with the old generic packaging of cheaper versions of brand name products. It was usually a plain yellow box or container that just said what was in it in black, boxy lettering. Like, CEREAL, or JUICE, or PREGNANCY TEST. Greg Funaro’s matter-of-factly written novel, The Sculptor, could have easily had a big yellow cover that simply said, ‘BOOK.’

It wasn’t a bad book, and it wasn’t a good book. It simply exists. From a trite premise (which I know I’ve seen before in one form or another—only the MO has changed) to a cookie-cutter love story, this book just was.

I normally enjoy thrillers that have a procedural feel to them (i.e., Silence of the Lambs or even stuff written by Kathy Reichs or Dan Brown), but this book dropped all of the stuff that makes those books great. It abandons good detective work for amazing intuition. It was as if Sam Markham’s gut was a better FBI special agent than he was. Give that gut a badge, is what I say. There are characters that don’t really belong, such as Sam’s partner. She ends up being the only one who does any real detective work, but is relegated to off-page work that is only referenced. What got me was, I read the first 30 pages and thought for sure I was getting a Thomas Harris-esque read, but beyond those pages Funaro gave up on trying to build an FBI world I cared about. Even the epilogue seemed to be there only because Funaro thought his book had to have that ending. It was an ending I expected through the entire book.

In fact, I didn’t care about any of the characters. They were such simple caricatures of other writers’ work, that I felt like I’d been there before. He tried to develop his main protagonist, “the pretty Asian art historian,” into some sort of romance novel heroine (She’s beautiful, smart, strong and flawed! I swear, there’s a flaw in there somewhere!). But there wasn’t really a flaw. She was too perfect. As was Sam, the English-teacher-turned-FBI-superstar!

Funaro’s writing is clean and clear, which worked to this book’s advantage, because the plot and narrative were also clean and clear. There were no great similes or metaphors, no flowery prose or complex themes. Even the antagonist seemed to meet all the stereotypical criteria for being a psycho. It’s given to us like the ingredients on the back of a (generic) cereal box: physically abusive mother-30% DV; sexually abusive mother-40% DV; murderous trigger-20% DV.

Aside from being as formulaic as Bisquick Shake n Pour, the dialogue was about awful—but also very plain. It’s as if Funaro (who, per the back cover, is an associate professor in the School of Theatre and Dance at East Carolina University) has never heard people speak. I’m hard-pressed to think of one person who uses the word “thus,” let alone a whole cadre of people who use it out loud in daily conversation. Is it his theatre background that causes him to use it? Or just a desire to be so correct that he does so at the expense of realistic dialogue?

I really wanted to like the book, but I never thought I’d read something that I was so indifferent about. If I weren’t reading this for class, I don’t think I would have finished it. Not because it was terrible, but because I’d have forgotten I was reading it.

The Church of Dead Girls, or "Stephen Dobyns Opens a Phone Book and Tells Us About Everybody In It. And, Oh Yeah, One of Them is a Murdering Pscho" by Stephen Dobyns

The Church of Dead Girls is, quite possibly, the most painful read I’ve had in quite some time. I really wanted this semester to be the one where I don’t bash a book, especially one written by such a prolific author.

I’ll start with the cast of characters. It’s a mighty list and Dobyns exhaustively goes into detail about just about everybody in the town. Where they grew up, when they moved away, when they moved back, what they were like as a kid, who dated who, and what each of their houses is like. It’s a list that’s designed to say that anybody is a suspect, keep your eye on them. Because there are so many characters, and the identity of the killer isn’t exposed until about twenty pages from the end, trying to play along and sort out the clues is akin to guessing how many gumballs are in a fishbowl… there's no possible way of actually knowing, so you just throw out a random number and maybe you’re right. So I’ll say that when I found out who the killer was, I just didn’t care. I was just glad it was over.

Red herrings. There were more red herrings in this book than at a communist fish market. There were characters and events that only served to muddy the waters, and it wasn’t even in a fun way. We’re told at the beginning of the book from our narrator (I’ll get to that guy in a minute) that everything is connected, but the connections are forced. They’re more implied than actual, and only served to give Dobyns an opportunity to set up a soap box and wax philosophical about small towns and the human condition.

Our narrator, who I don’t believe we’re ever given a name for—egad how frustrating it was to go on a 400+ page adventure with somebody who didn’t even tell us his name—seemed to know everything about everything that occurred, and for somebody who claimed to be a private person he sure as hell must have talked to everybody in town to get the level of detail he achieved. There were some details he never bothered to attribute, and were of such an intimate nature the question of how he knew about them begged to be asked. Let me re-iterate: He never told me his name. It’s like picking up a hitch hiker, listening to him tell a 12 hour story about a bunch of people he knew, but never finding out his name. That’s a key part to any relationship, and I just dedicated a week of my life to this guy. I’ve never had a one-night stand, but I believe this is the literary equivalent, and I hated it.

Dobyns' mastery of the past perfect tense is awe-inspiring… and downright annoying. There was a “had” in almost every sentence. I was counting on one page and when I got the tenth sentence, there was a double “had.” A “had had” right there. I actually took extra-strength Excedrin to get through the rest of the chapter.

The book opened with a description of a crime scene, and it was a pretty good. I felt optimistic about the story. But that’s the problem when you start a story in present tense, and then go 400 pages of past perfect, it gets muddled down by phrasing. The psycho seemed almost cartoonish, a caricature of what a psycho should be. Maybe it’s because we found out more about the bartender’s motives in life than we did our antagonist, but he was such a paper-thin character throughout the book, that there wasn’t a whole lot to go back on and say, “yup, shoulda seen that coming.” He was a peripheral character who seemed like a normal enough fellow. I know, I know, that’s the point, right? Dobyns hit us over the head with his “you don’t really know the person next to you” sermons, and BAM! there it is.

I’m sure this book has its fans, but I’m not one of them. Call me uneducated or obtuse, but this book left me angry at the end. Not because of the ending, but because the whole thing was such an epic time-suck. It is unnecessarily long in my opinion, but others may argue that the deep characterization of the townfolk is imperative to the story. That our narrator tells us so much about them and yet, we know very little about them and the people in our own lives.

It would make me think harder about that message if the delivery wasn’t so flawed.

What I did enjoy about this book was the absurd response the town had to the disappearance of three young girls. From roving bands of vigilantes to paranoid finger-pointing, the hysterics grow with each abduction until it teeters on all-out mayhem. It was fun to watch people grow ignorant from fear. And it seemed especially poignant in this day and age.

American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis

If ever there is a book that captured the essence and excess of the late 1980s, it is American Psycho. It is a book that is set so comfortably in that era, that I don’t believe it would work in any other before or since. Yes, the subject could be carried over to the ‘90s or 2000s, or even the ‘50s or ‘70s, but to work on the level that this book did, it could only be set in the age of high technology, and the hustle and bustle of Manhattan and Wall Street. This is the same decade that gave us a litany of Wall Street-set films, and presented the need to develop wealth as almost altruistic: Wall Street, Risky Business, The Secret to My Success, Trading Places. 9 to 5. If you watched a lot of movies in the 1980s, you NEEDED to make money. The Patty Winters Show this morning was about used cars salesmen and the strangest things they’ve found in trunks.

Ellis wrote this book at the end of the decade, at the time we finally started to look hard at yuppie worship, and he produced a masterful story that put a fun-house mirror in front of society. The reflection glaring back at us, through blood-shot eyes surrounded by a blood-splattered face, was Patrick Bateman.

Pat Bateman, a Wall Street playboy who excels at murders and executions, er mergers and acquisitions, and who spends his evenings visiting the many clubs and restaurants in New York City with his friends(?), co-workers (?), and girlfriend (?). They are all adrift in a sea of rich, superficial professionals, whose only goals appear to be to bang the closest hardbody and eat at the most exclusive restaurants.

What sets Pat Bateman apart from the rest of the characters, is that he knows that’s what it’s all about. He knows they’re all self-obsessed. He sees the muddy banks they’re all trying to scramble up, that lead only to more muddy banks, and he’s laughing at them. He’s laughing at them and himself, because he knows that to reach the top of that bank is to only set his eyes on the next one. But he feels compelled to do it.

Bateman has a slew of idiosyncrasies: His obsession with music (there are three chapters dedicated to espousing the brilliance of Genesis, Whitney Houston, and Huey Lewis), his obsession with style, with renting and returning video tapes. He all but plans his day around morning and nighttime talk shows. I could go on, but the point I’m trying to make is, Pat Bateman is a psycho, but also the most human character in this book.

Watching Bateman decline through the book, slowly at first and then picking up speed, then slowing and jerking forward, is a treat. Bearing witness to his atrocities and his descriptions is sinfully delicious, and packed with enough humor to almost bring levity to the horrors he commits. He cries because he doesn’t know if he’s microwaving a head correctly.

Writing about Bateman is hard. “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman…”

So, I’m going to write about my experience with this book, because I experienced so many conflicts as I read through, and I think they were the exact responses Ellis was shooting for.

For the first 100 pages, I thought I was reading the most over-rated and boring novel with one-dimensional characters and no plot. It took me four days to get through them.

The second 100 pages developed enough momentum, and I started to see Bateman as he was: a three-dimensional character in a world filled with outlines of people. There was some sex and murder, but nothing I’d call world shattering. It took me two days to get through those pages.

The third 100 pages ripped me out of my fucking chair and took me into Bateman’s head like no other novel has ever been able to do. I began to see the other characters like he did. The world he lived in started to make sense to me, and, even more scary, I saw why it shouldn’t make sense at all. I don’t know how long it took me to read those 100 pages, because I devoured the balance of the book, 200 pages in all, in one day.

Some people won’t like this book. Half of it could be cut just by omitting the fashion advice and learning about who is wearing whom. But that’s one idiosyncrasy that holds up through the entire book, wavering only once that I saw, as if his need to know fashion is the only thing rooting him in the world of sanity. It’s gory. Possibly overly so. It’s the literary equal to the season 7 premier of that show about early morning mall walkers. The sex scenes are so graphic as to put the movie’s versions to shame.

In the end, the reader must ask themselves: did any of that really happen, or was it all (or most or some) in his head? There are clues that lend credibility to the latter. Paul Owen’s disappearance and what later happens in his apartment... his housekeeper never questioning the copious amounts of blood she has to clean up… finding a bone in his Dove bar… These are all things that make the reader take pause and ask that question. What do I think, you wonder?

I, uh, have to go rent—I mean—return some videos.

Psycho, by Robert Bloch

Well, that escalated quickly.

I’m still digesting the book, and the prudent thing to do is to wait a day or so before doing this, but I’ve never been a very prudent person (I’m pursuing an MFA in Popular Fiction forchrissakes!). So here goes…

Reading Psycho after knowing the big twist was actually fun from an analytical point of view. From the first few pages when we meet Mrs. Bates, I could identify some of the techniques Bloch used to present Norma Bates as a living person without hinting that she’s really dead. In that first scene, we see that Norman doesn’t look at or touch his mother. She’s there, in the peripherals, berating him over his choice of reading materials and terminal bachelorhood. She never comes around to talk to him face on, and he even mentions that he wants to ignore her as if she weren’t actually there. What’s fun, is that in those early pages we not only meet Norman Bates, but also see Norma Bates as if she’s a real, living person to us as much as she is to him.

There are other instances throughout the book that also work, such as when he sees her after waking from one of his fugue states. He sees her as a waking-dream, leading the reader into believing she’s actually present. It’s pretty brilliant. The first 50 pages was a blast to read and dissect, even if I knew what was coming.

And then things escalated. And not in a good way. By escalate I mean spiraled into a clunky narrative of one-dimensional characters, unbelievable plot points and haphazard mechanics . But, before I get into all of the bad, I want to point out something great about Bloch’s writing: It’s as easily digestible today as it was nearly 60 years ago when he wrote this book. For the most part, the language he used and the dialogue from the characters is rarely dated. Unlike Richard Matheson, Bloch didn’t use wide brush strokes, but rather pointed, acute writing that may very well be found in novels written this decade. Of course, it wasn’t without exception, but even those were rare moments that usually focused around the technology of the time.

Maybe it’s that time that led us to the biggest plot hole: why were the police never called? The thin reasoning that the company wanted to save embarrassment for both Mary Crane and the Lowery firm didn’t make sense to me. Maybe it was different back then, but I would still think that a $40,000 theft and a missing girl would garner some sort of police response. It’s that sort of slipshod reasoning that made me roll my eyes more than once. I can’t really nit-pick Lila Crane’s motives because this was written in the 50s, but her constant dependence on the men in the book made me squirm. There was never any chance she could save her sister, but the book would have only been a hundred pages long if she would have gone to the police when she wanted to.

And let’s face it, we wouldn’t have lost much if that happened. The first fifty pages were the strongest of the book, and the 150 that followed did little to advance Norman’s story-line. The eventual discovery of his multiple personalities was delivered in a clinical rundown from a character that probably should have died in the hotel office, but for some reason Bloch spared him. I could see this book ending with Lila making a visit to the State Hospital and talking to the psychiatrist herself (that would help her character arc as a near-helpless woman to somebody who takes control of the situation and her life. Instead she leaves it all in the hands of the man that made the whole ordeal stretch out a week or more longer than it needed to.

Anyway, I’d talk about the climax, but there wasn’t one. Because, once again, the guy who probably should have died shows up in the nick of time and has the easiest save of any hero I’ve ever seen or read.

Even with all the negative things I’ve written about, the pace and brevity of the book made it a decent read, one that can be done on a lazy morning while sipping coffee (and that’s just how I read it).