Most people would agree dead bodies are not a good thing. When one falls into your path, you step around or over it, or else you bury it with ceremony and weep. But there are a few enterprising folk who know how to make dead bodies work for them. One such creative entrepreneur is James Lewis, whose story is recounted by Joy Bergmann in her article “A Bitter Pill” in The Chicago Reader. Here’s a guy with oodles of initiative and imagination. He spots a dead body, and instead of thinking, “How sad!” or “Maybe I should call the police,” he asks himself three questions:

Does the dead body have money in the bank?

In 1978, Bergmann relates, the body of a Kansas City man named Raymond West was found dismembered in his attic. The body was too decomposed to determine a cause of death, but the cops soon learned Lewis had been lurking around the house after West’s disappearance and had cashed a $5000 check, supposedly signed by West. A business loan, Lewis insisted. Perfectly legitimate. After he was arrested, he told the cops the truth: Finding West dead in his home of natural causes, Lewis had done what any clever fellow would do — dismembered the body and hidden it in the attic, taped a note on the door so people would think West had gone on vacation, then helped himself to the checkbook. He was no killer! Only a scavenger.

Old House Smaller

For a while it seemed Lewis would be punished for showing some initiative, but he had an excellent attorney who glommed onto various procedural errors and argued eloquently:

“It’s one thing to kill somebody, it’s another to thing to dismember them after they’re dead. And while dismembering somebody after they’re dead is repulsive and repugnant, it’s not homicide” (qtd. in Bergmann).

Does the dead body scare the bejesus out of people?

In 1982 a wacko in Chicago bought several bottles of Tylenol, replaced the painkiller in some of the capsules with cyanide, and then replanted the bottles on various drugstore shelves. Some younger people might wonder how he put new plastic seals around the bottle caps. He didn’t have to. In those days bottles of over-the-counter medicine and vitamins were unsealed. After seven people died from taking the poisoned Tylenol capsules, that changed. We now have tamper-resistant packaging. James Lewis seized the opportunity to blackmail the company that made Tylenol, warning that more people would die unless he was paid a million dollars. Instead of being praised for trying to make lemonade from these unfortunate dead lemons, he was caught and sent to prison for extortion. Worse, the cops suspected him of being the wacko who did the poisoning. But they never made a case against him.  Of course not. His only crime was trying to generate some income.

The Tylenol poisonings remain one of the major unsolved crimes of the last century.

Do people want to read about the dead body?

In this case, the answer seems to be no.

Several years ago Lewis published a novel about — what else? — mysterious poisonings that spread panic through a community. He promoted the novel on his Web site as part of a campaign to uncover the truth about the Tylenol poisonings in 1982. To date, the novel has three reviews on Amazon.com. One of them, written by Lewis himself, extols the novel and awards it five stars. The second reviewer titles his review “The Only Book I’d Burn” and the third declares that Lewis isn’t getting any of his money. I usually disapprove of reviews by people who haven’t read the book, but not this time.

If the FBI doesn’t finally nail James Lewis, I hope he ends up in a nursing home where the caretakers treat him callously, ignoring his complaints about the unbearable pain that never leaves him. “Bring me some fucking Tylenol!” he’ll scream. And the attendant outside in the corridor, slumped in her chair, will turn another page of People magazine.

 

Joy Bergmann’s article is worth reading: A Bitter Pill

Here’s a rerun of  an old essay on use of the second person for new readers who missed it the first time around. I’m kind of proud of this one. 

You don’t see much fiction in second-person point of view. You encounter plenty of characters who tell their own stories and all kinds of third-person narration, but only a few quirky narrators who address you the reader directly. Second person is unconventional and unexpected. Readers can be put off by its strangeness. There is also presumption in addressing readers directly, telling them what they they’re doing and thinking. The second person takes liberties, like a stranger who seizes your arm and tries to steer you where you hadn’t thought to go.

Sometimes it can be downright aggressive.

Point of view defines the relationship between the writer, the character, and the reader. In first person, a character speaks to the reader with the writer as an invisible medium. In the various modes of third person, the writer becomes visible and mediates between reader and character, creating a connection ranging from subjectivity that reveals every thought to the objectivity of a camera that shows only external action.

With second person this triangular relationship becomes complicated. While a third-person narrator is understood to be the author – or rather, a constructed version of the author – a second person narrator might be either the author’s persona or a character in the story, and might be speaking to the reader, to another character, or to itself.

In Albert Camus’ The Fall, the second-person perspective is unobtrusive in the beginning. The novel seems to be written in first person. The narrator, a former lawyer, speaks to an unnamed and silent listener. They meet in a bar in Amsterdam, and the narrator begins the story of his downfall. He continues the tale as they meet several more times over the next few days. It’s a story of lost innocence. Like Adam after the Fall, the narrator sees he is naked and understands that he — like every human being — is guilty. Several events contribute to the awakening. The most crucial happens while he is walking alone at night and sees a woman jump from a bridge. Rather than trying to rescue her or calling for help, he walks away.

The incident changes the narrator. He becomes self-conscious, a divided being: “My reflection was smiling in the mirror, but it seemed to me that my smile was double.” He looks at the world with new eyes. Although he is guilty, he is beyond judgment. No one is capable of judging him since they are equally guilty. Once an earnest believer in law, he rejects morality and the concept of justice. He explains to the listener:

If pimps and thieves were invariably sentenced, all decent people would get to thinking they themselves are constantly innocent . . . That’s what must be avoided above all. Otherwise everything would be just a joke.

At first the listener seems no more than a handy dramatic device. The narrator has to confess to someone. But it slowly becomes clear that the listener is part of the story; he is implicated. The narrator admits to stealing a valuable painting, and the listener could expose him. But he won’t. He sees himself in the narrator, just as readers do. The second person in The Fall includes not only the listener, but everyone. We’re all guilty.

In his short story “Videotape,” Don DeLillo uses second person narration directly. The story has no I, only you. The narrator is watching a video clip on the news. Filmed accidentally by a child, the clip shows a man being shot in his car by someone called the Texas Highway Killer. The narrator is obsessed with the clip and wants to watch it every time it appears on a news show. And he watches himself play out the obsession the way he would watch himself on video. He becomes an image of himself, objectified and placed in a framework for analysis:

You keep on looking because things combine to hold you fast – a sense of the random, the amateurish, the accidental, the impending.

His thoughts stretch beyond his small obsession to reach the understanding that video has radically changed reality for him and everyone else in our culture. Even the killer’s modus operandi is inspired by video.

Second-person point of view is necessary to this story. It models the way video affects how we look at ourselves, shapes our thinking. It implicates readers, whose reality has been shaped by video whether they know it or not. It reveals our collective obsession with recording and replaying. Remember Rodney King’s beating by the police and Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during a half-time performance at the Super Bowl? Video clips of these events were aired hundreds of times on TV. They have become part of our collective reality, or as DeLillo describes it, “the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you are thinking.”

From these two examples, second person seems to be a technique for literary masters, but it’s available to any writer who cares to give it a shot. I wrote a section of my thriller Talion in second-person and present tense. A girl is enduring torture at the hands of a sadistic killer. I wanted the narrative to feel intense and immediate. First-person failed to convey the shattered state of a character whose personality is being destroyed along with her body and who struggles to hold onto a fragment of her personality.

I’m presumptuous, talking about my writing along with that of masters like DeLillo and Camus, as if I’m anywhere near their league. I write genre fiction, but I try to learn from the best. What matters is whether the technique works. If second person were wrong for the section, it would be a distraction. Apparently it’s not. Though a few readers have criticized Talion for its occasional shifts into present tense – something they think shouldn’t be done in genre fiction – no one seems to have noticed the second-person narration. Maybe the descriptions of torture are so harrowing that readers don’t notice she and her have become you and your and they’ve joined the victim beneath the killer’s knife.

As with any literary technique, second person works best when it has both a narrative and thematic purpose. Ideally, writers don’t up and decide to write in second person; they have a story that can’t be written any other way.

Video streaming is dangerous for me. I’m obsessive, and unlimited access to TV episodes has turned me into a binge viewer who consumes up to fourteen 40-minute episodes in a single day. It’s unhealthy and certainly unproductive. Over time patterns have emerged from my viewing choices. Disturbing patterns. I prefer stories with violence — lots and lots of violence— and heroes who are psychopathic and downright scary. Now I’m setting out to understand who these characters are and why I’m drawn to them despite the terrible things they do. I’m beginning with Dexter Morgan, protagonist of Dexter. I wrote this post a few years ago, while Dexter was still on cable (and before poor Rita gets slaughtered by the Trinity Killer), but my feelings about the lovable serial killer haven’t changed.

As one of six million plus Facebook followers of the Showtime series Dexter, I occasionally visit his page to view the photos and video teasers. Photos of Dexter (Michael C. Hall) draw effusive comments from women who think he’s “so Hottttt!!!!” and “soo sexy.” A more thoughtful fan muses that he’s “nothing special,” but nonetheless “that guy is killing me softly.” Not that I’m judging anyone here. I’ve watched every episode of Dexter at least twice. Like the women who coo over the photos, I’m besotted. Sometimes I do wonder why. Dexter is, after all, a serial killer.

The third fan is right, it’s not his looks. Though Michael C. Hall has a certain animal magnetism, he isn’t wildly handsome. The attraction is to the character he plays so well. Thanks to his foster father, a policeman, Dexter has learned to channel his murderous impulses for the good of society. He only kills murderers. “Taking out the garbage,” he calls it. His job as a blood splatter analyst for the Miami police allows him to identity the people who have gotten away with murder, and he takes care to find them guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. But he’s still a psychopath with a compulsion to cut people into little pieces. It’s really, really icky.

Dexter-Morgan-dexter-8253574Much of the credit for Dexter’s lovability goes to the show’s writers. The stories are told from his point of view with voiceover narration, so viewers see the world from his perspective. At the beginning of the series, he presents himself as a monster incapable of connecting with other human beings. His loneliness is touching. Every season a story unfolds, and at the heart of each one is Dexter’s quest to find somebody who sees and accepts him for what he is. Things never work out. His would-be friends and lovers are either so homicidal he’s forced to kill them, or like Lumen — a woman seeking revenge on the men who raped and brutalized her — they aren’t homicidal enough.

This need to be truly seen could explain some of his ritual. He speaks to the murderers on his killing table and confronts them with their victims. He wants them conscious when he cuts their faces to make the blood slides he keeps as trophies. They must see what they’ve done. And they must see him.

Despite his expertise in killing and not getting caught, Dexter is hapless on a social level. He’s perplexed by the most ordinary situations. Since he can’t feel emotions the way others do, he has no idea what to say or how to act. Often he mimics what he observes other people doing or saying. Dexter botches his wedding proposal to Rita twice. Then he hears a stalker confess to killing the unreceptive object of her passion. “My life was an unanswered question,” she tells a detective tearfully. “He made everything real.” Dexter recycles the lines when he proposes to Rita a third time. She bursts into tears and says yes. As much as I like the character of Rita, I can’t help laughing at how easily she’s taken in.

As the series continues, Dexter slowly discovers his humanity. There are dramatic turning points. In the first season his biological brother – a psycho killer like him – demands that he kill his foster sister. “Does it have to be Deb?” he asks plaintively. “I’m – fond of her.” But of course it has to be Deb. Forced to choose, Dexter slays the newfound brother who sees and accepts him rather than the sister with whom he has grown up and who has “a blind spot” when it comes to him.

Rita-Season-2-dexter-17806622In the second season he chooses the clueless Rita over Lila, his soulmate. Over and over he thwarts the monster in himself and affirms his humanity. In the end he becomes a lovable human being with a bad habit. Messy and morally dubious, but no worse than drug addiction. It’s both apt and ironic that Dexter has to attend Narcotics Anonymous meetings because Rita thinks he’s a heroin addict. Speaking to the group, he describes the Dark Passenger that compels him without specifying what it compels him to do. The other addicts assume he’s talking about drug addiction and nod in understanding.

Poor Dexter, he can’t help himself. He was traumatized as a child. And the world is better off without the murderers he kills. I’ve had my problems with substance abuse. I get lonely too. Sometimes I have no idea how to behave around people and have to fake it, just like Dexter. We’re so much alike. And now that I really look at him, he’s so Hottttt!!

I see you, Dexter! I love you just the way you are.

 

 

Photos from Fan Pop

During my research of serial killers I snatched up the book The Sociopath Next Door, figuring it was perfect for my purpose. I would learn all about that guy whose neighbors shake their heads in disbelief after he’s arrested for torturing and killing prostitutes. “He was so quiet,” they say. “The last person you would have suspected.”The Sociopath Next Door [Book]

But the author, Martha Stout, isn’t particularly interested in serial killers. Sure, they’re sociopaths, but so are lots of other people. Four percent of America’s population, according to Stout, is congenitally unable to feel any affection for other human beings. This four percent can hurt or even kill others without feeling any guilt. But most aren’t driven by blood lust to become another Ted Bundy. They’re motivated by other emotions — fear, envy, anger, sloth, the desire to win. Really, sociopaths feel the same things as the rest of us with the one exception. They cannot love. Sociopathy is characterized by the absence of conscience. You don’t feel guilty about hurting other beings unless you can empathize with them — feel their pain.

I’ve known people who clearly fit Stout’s definition. Some of the plagiarists in my composition classes felt no shame whatsoever. Sure, they cried. But the tears dried fast when they failed to get results. When I was using drugs in my twenties, some of my fellow druggies had no compunction about taking advantage of their “friends.” Some might argue it was the drugs. But while drugs do have a way of corroding one’s moral fiber, many people use them without becoming cold and ruthless. Even so, I haven’t noticed that anywhere near four percent of the people I’ve known are sociopathic. It seems I’ve missed quite a few. And these days I move in circles less likely to be frequented by sociopaths. Still, I wonder about that statistic. Stout never explains who arrived at the percentage, or how.

And the percentage applies to the United States, not to other parts of the world. Stout notes that the incidence of sociopathic behavior is lower in many Asian countries and theorizes that cultural differences are the reason. In cultures that stress interconnectedness, people born without the capacity for empathy learn how to fake it. American individualism, on the other hand, encourages them to express their true selves. Makes sense. Many un-sociopathic Americans feel entitled to do as they like. They accept the exploitation of one human being by another as natural and hate the constraints of “big guvment.” They break the speed limit all the time without remorse — until a cop pulls them over.

Stout spends a couple of chapters on the evolutionary and personal advantages of sociopathy and its opposite, conscience. She concludes that while sociopaths make great warriors, they are by and large miserable human beings. People of conscience are happier and ultimately more successful. Conscience being a moral concept, the book ends with musings on morality and religion. Stout writes well enough that I kept reading, even though I knew she had nothing to teach me about serial killers.