Today's guest blog is the pen name of the acclaimed novelist Glen Duncan.
In a brilliant essay ‘Princes of Darkness’, published in the
BFI’s companion volume to its Gothic film season in 2013 (Gothic: The Dark
Heart of Film), screenwriter and novelist David Pirie makes a simple but
invaluable observation: Count Dracula is a serial killer. A further
observation, no less revelatory, follows: Hannibal Lecter is one of his direct
fictional descendants.
What Dracula and Lecter
have in common is that they’re presented to us as finished psychologies.
Although Thomas Harris would later get into the dear doctor’s background, the
definitive version is the one we find in Red Dragon and The Silence
of the Lambs. In these two novels Lecter’s character, like his Gothic
forebear’s, does not invite therapeutic questions. We’re not remotely
interested in putting him on the analyst’s couch. He’s a terminal personality
rendered so convincingly and thrillingly that it’s enough just to hang out with
him and watch him in action, never mind the antecedents, never mind the Why?
He’s a done deal. He’s his own brutally perfected Last
Word.
This is one way of
imagining serial killers, and it does much to explain our fascination with
them. To read them, to watch them on screen, is to indulge in the same cathartic
escapism provided by watching the antics of wild animals or boisterous plants:
these are organisms doing what they do sans any of the moral or existential
paraphernalia with which the rest of us are so annoyingly saddled. It’s
liberating. It’s a blast. I have the impulse to kill people very often:
tail-gaters, queue-jumpers, over-users of the word ‘basically’, anyone whose
phone is set to emit that currently ubiquitous five note whistle (designed,
presumably, by Lucifer); the problem is I lack the psychology. My cowardly
frontal lobes are fine. If our pleasure in fictional sociopaths is vicarious
wish-fulfilment, it raises the ticklish (if familiar) question: Without them to
get us off imaginatively, would more of us be serial killers?
I repeat: This is one
way of imagining the bad boys (and occasionally bad girls). It’s no
coincidence that these ‘apex predators’ are so often presented as charming,
erudite and classy, as likely to hum Bartók or quote Milton as to whack you in
the face with a claw hammer. If they represent our latent or repressed selves,
if they’re fantasies, then why not make them articulate culture vultures
while we’re at it? No one wants to be a psycho with a comb-over and shell suit.
Psychiatric medicine
and investigative journalism have, between them, debunked this myth and
replaced it with a much less titillating truth: that by and large the people
who do these things are dull and damaged, bereft of insight and driven by
dreary compulsions, imaginatively and emotionally dead, cognitively impaired
and not infrequently sexually impotent without the Viagra of psychotic
violence. In short, they’re boring. More boring still, if the so called ‘psychopathic
gene’ is admitted to the party. Granted it’s neither a necessary nor sufficient
condition for serial murder, but still, it’s hard not to feel a bit
short-changed if the great monsters reduce to nothing more snazzy than lousy
DNA.
But even assuming the
shrinks are right and the journos’ interviews genuine, our fascination lingers.
My optimist believes
this is because we want to understand the puzzles - redundant in the cases of
Lecter and the Count - of How and Why. My ludicrous optimist goes
further: the better we understand the root causes, the more likely we’ll be to
put time and energy into eliminating them.
My pessimist, on the
other hand, says it’s because in spite of all evidence to the contrary we can’t
shake the suspicion that there’s something serial killers know that we don’t.
We think of them as beings who’ve been out beyond the moral boundaries - to
visit God or the Devil or Nothingness - and returned bearing the experience’s
inscrutable imprimatur. Our imaginative habit insists they’re the possessors of
forbidden knowledge, even though our reason has long since identified the majority
of them as morons - albeit lethal ones.
Either
way - in our fictions, fantasies and fears - the serial killer is here to stay.
Reference: ‘Princes of
Darkness’ by David Pirie in Gothic: The Dark Heart of Film, ed. James
Bell, (BFI, London, 2013)
The Killing Lessons
When
the two strangers turn up at Rowena Cooper's isolated Colorado farmhouse, she
knows instantly that it's the end of everything. For the two haunted and driven
men, on the other hand, it's just another stop on a long and bloody journey.
And they still have many miles to go, and victims to sacrifice, before their
work is done. For San Francisco homicide
detective Valerie Hart, their trail of corpses - women abducted, tortured and
left with a seemingly random series of objects inside them - has brought her
from obsession to the edge of physical and psychological destruction. And she's
losing hope of making a breakthrough before that happens. But the slaughter at the Cooper farmhouse
didn't quite go according to plan. There was a survivor, Rowena's 10-year-old
daughter Nell, who now holds the key to the killings. Injured, half-frozen,
terrified, Nell has only one place to go. And that place could be even more
terrifying than what she's running from.
The Killing Lessons by Saul Black (Orion) is out now price £12.99
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