Katherine Addison's Blog, page 38

Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 2

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.

Chapter 2: Cannibals and Christians: European vs. American Indian Culture

Again, it helps to remember that Slotkin's interest is in white men, not anybody else. He does do a surprisingly good job of specifying which Native American culture he's talking about, which is something many historians of colonial America are just awful at. And he does a not-terrible job of considering how the Europeans looked to the Native Americans, even though his focus is on how the Native Americans looked to the Europeans. (And he's consistent in his bias. He's talking exclusively about Native American men and their world view, not about Native American women at all, just like European women are invisible to him.)

I'm torn between my suspicion that he's romanticizing the "primitive" and their "natural" connection to their myths and my admiration for the way he conceptualizes the juxtaposition of Puritan and Native American world views. (And, like I said, he specifies that he's talking about the Delaware Indians, also called the Lenni Lenape. I hope the beliefs he ascribes to them are their actual beliefs.) He's very influenced by Campbell and Jung (with Freud lurking in the background, as Freud so often does), and he's still got this horrific failure to understand how storytelling and art work:

In its primary form the hero myth reflects the mental journey of the mystic, the man who drowns his consciousness in the inner ocean of his mind or the ocean of the universal god. The hero myth itself, however, presents the quest of consciousness in social and historical terms: it takes place in the "real" world, the world of time and event; and it involves a hero who is the symbolic vessel of the whole culture's collective consciousness and the agent of their will to survive or their aspiration to power. In Europe during the Age of Discovery, however, such myths were better known in their romantic, conventionalized forms than in their primary forms. Centuries of literary and philosophical embellishment had substituted artifice and convention for mythopoetic spontaneity in epic poetry and tragedy. The Romans imitated the forms of the Greek poems and plays that inexplicably moved them, and in their concern with formal imitation they lost the sense of life inherent in the myths. The medieval scholars and troubadors ornamented and elaborated the received tradition, hiding the core of myth under a panoply of social and religious conventions, imposing rigid artistic categories on the received material, rather than illuminating the mythic essentials that transcend artificial distinctions of genre.
(Slotkin 29)

There are so many problems here I almost don't even know how to start. He has a serious down on courtly love (which he thinks is a distorted travesty of the myth of the hero who sexually conquers the Earth-mother) and will say nothing good about it. But my real issue is with the implication hidden in this passage that Greek poets were "free" of artifice and convention, when in fact the truth is anything but. Any oral tradition of poetry (which is what Homer is) is built of conventions. It has to be, because the poet has to have those blocks ready to hand as he's building his poem on the fly. And Greek drama, which I am significantly better acquainted with, is certainly not free of artifice. Greek drama is a highly artificial art form--which I don't mean in a negative sense. Artifice is not a bad thing; you can't turn a series of events into a story without it. And the mental picture Slotkin induces, of Euripides, of all people, warbling his native wood notes wild, is . . . well, it's freakin' hilarious. But it's also very very wrong.

The Greek poets were not innocent myth-makers, and if you want to talk about somebody "imposing rigid artistic categories on the received material," let's sit down and talk about Aristotle's theory of tragedy for a while. Slotkin is imposing a false dichotomy between "primitive" and "civilized" art, and while this irritates me for several reasons, the big one is that it denies artistic agency to "primitive" poets, "primitive" meaning those who work or worked in oral traditions or who come early in his teleological schema of chronological progress from "pure" myth to "artificial" poetry. I don't know enough about Delaware/Lenape traditions of story-telling and poetry to know if he's doing them the same disservice, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess the answer is "yes."

So it's all very Campbellian, with a healthy side of The Golden Bough, and there's a Jungian anima wandering around and a Freudian Id, and I'm skeptical in several places, partly because I am always skeptical when twentieth century psychological schematics are imposed on pre-twenteith century people, and partly because Slotkin makes it all sound so simple when I know it's anything but.

(There's also a serious problem wherein nobody told him that More's Utopia is Janus-faced. It's a utopia, but it's also a satire. It cannot be read as simply an idealization of the New World without missing a good 50% to 90%, depending on where you draw that satirical line, of what More's actually doing.)

I love his point about European mythology about the West: "In the mythology of Europe, the West and its peoples were strongly associated with the kingdom of death and dreams, the underworld" (28). That puts such a dark and beautiful spin on the whole idea of exploration (and resonates for me with Hamlet's "undiscovered country") that I love it and distrust it at the same time.

But then I think Slotkin's straight up brilliant when he starts talking about the Puritans and how they understood the New World. He points out that the Puritans in America were far from being the only Puritans who decided that subjugation and extermination were the only way to deal with an inconvenient native people: cf. Cromwell and the Irish. He talks about the stark contrast in Puritan and Native American understandings of the divine, where for the Native American peoples, the divine was in the world and for Puritans, the divine was what Slotkin calls "otherworldly," which I think is not a great term, but what he means is that the divine is separate from the world. God can choose to reach down and affect the mortal, sublunary world of sin and suffering, but he is not part of that world. That's one of the reasons Jesus is a vital part of Christian mythology: he is the part of God that experiences the sublunary world in all its imperfection and pain. And then, significantly, returns to that perfect place outside the spheres of Creation when his Hero's Journey is complete.

(There's no place in Christian mythology to talk about whether Jesus' understanding of Heaven was changed by his sojourn in the world, as the Campbellian Hero's understanding of the world is changed by his sojourn in the underworld, but it's a really interesting question.)

Okay, sorry. Tangent. My point is that Slotkin's point is that the Puritans and Native Americans had diametrically opposed and incompatible views of how the divine and the human interact. This is coupled with another problem, which is the Puritans' understanding of their own cultural teleology, their mission statement, if you'll forgive the anachronism. (Maybe my favorite sentence in this chapter is "[Puritan] religion portrayed the progress of the soul as a rising up from the degradation of man's condition at birth to ultimate sanctification through divine grace--a kind of spiritual upward mobility" (37).") In setting out for the New World, the Puritans "desired above all [...] a tabula rasa on which they could inscribe their dream: the outline of an idealized Puritan England, a Bible commonwealth, a city on a hill exemplifying the World of God to all the world" (38). The Native Americans are monstrously inconvenient to this mission, and even worse is the Puritans' us vs. them thinking, which is something inherent to Puritanism: the Elect vs. the damned, the godly vs. the ungodly, the New Jerusalem vs. the Wilderness. When they looked around them, they saw everything through the lens of "a psychological and spiritual quest, a quest for salvation in the wilderness of the human mind and soul. The physical world of America was but the physical type of this primary wilderness" (39). Puritans lived in a very Manichean world of stark contrast between good and evil, and they also lived by typology, which is the practice of reading everything in the Old Testament as a "type" or vehicle for the only true story, which is the New Testament. Once you get the hang of that, you start reading everything as typology, and like Procrustes' bed or Cinderella's stepsisters, you chop off bits as necessary to fit.

Slotkin is kind of cavalier about dates, since he argues that the Puritans saw their colonization of America in terms of Pilgrim's Progress--and while I think that comes to be true, it does help to remember that Pilgrim's Progress wasn't published until 1678, a good fifty years after the Mayflower found Plymouth Rock. But Bunyan is a valuable primary source for understanding Puritan thought and their conception of themselves (and Pilgrim's Progress has the advantage of being far more entertaining than the sermons and diaries that are your other primary sources).

Puritans also saw themselves as constantly besieged, constantly at war against the ungodly who sought to destroy them--a narrative that does not help when encountering cultures alien to your own. (I ended up drawing a little Puritan City on the Hill in the margin, with the Church of England as a besieging army on one side and the Native Americans as a besieging army on the other.) (Also, damn the word "siege." It never looks right no matter how I spell it.) And the final piece he articulates that I think is incredibly valuable is the way the Puritans' Manichean thought patterns dealt with evil:

To the Indian the wilderness was a god, whether its face at the moment was good or evil; as a god it deserved and received worship for both its good and evil, its beauty and its cruelty. Similarly, all the gods and the earth itself were referred to as members of one's own immediate family, as close blood-relations. For the Puritan the problem of religion was to winnow the wheat from the chaff, the good from the evil, and to preserve the former and extirpate the latter. The evil was of the world, of nature; the good was transcendent and supernatural. Hence it was quite appropriate to destroy the natural wilderness in the name of a higher good--and quite inappropriate for anyone to worship, as the Indians did, the world or the things of the world, such things being evil by nature.
(Slotkin 51)

I don't know if his representation of Native American beliefs is accurate, or if he's done some dichotomous thinking of his own to make the contrast with the Puritans stronger, but he is spot-on about Puritan beliefs about evil being a part of the world and good being separate from it. (This also explains a lot about Puritan conceptualizations of the body and sexualilty.) And about how those beliefs, in practice, justifying as they did any kind of slaughter or betrayal, were so cruel and disastrous for both the people and the land of America

UBC: Phelps, The Devil's Rooming House

The Devil's Rooming House: The True Story of America's Deadliest Female Serial Killer by M. William Phelps

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I wanted to like this book. I really, truly did. It's about the abominable Amy Archer-Gilligan, who is the many, many times removed inspiration for the Brewster sisters in Arsenic and Old Lace. She ran a cross between a boarding house and a nursing home, and between 1908 and 1916 she murdered somewhere between five and sixty-six people. For their money. She also committed fraud, theft, embezzlement, what we would today call "elder abuse" . . . Two of her victims were her husbands. And she was a Tartuffe of the highest quality, claiming that the investigation was a witch hunt begun because some of her neighbors had taken against this poor, saintly Christian widow and that everyone who was suspicious of her ought to be ashamed of themselves.

I wanted to like this book. But it is honestly a mess.

Partly, this is because of the nature of the material. The Archer-Gilligan case is insanely complicated, because you have (1) the course of the perpetrator (fraud, embezzlement murder, etc.); (2) the widely varied courses of her victims; (3) an investigation that was begun by a reporter named Carlan Goslee years before the police got involved, which ranged hither, thither, and yon over Connecticut and Massachusetts, tracking down the relatives of Archer-Gilligan's victims and other interested parties; (4) the police investigation, including exhumations and autopsies of corpses with enough arsenic in them to kill five men apiece; (5) the trial, appeal, retrial, conviction, prison sentence, and Amy Archer-Gilligan's eventual committal to an insane asylum, where she died in 1962. That's a lot of trails to follow, and I don't know how to arrange it coherently, either.

But Phelps causes a lot of his own problems. He bounces back and forth in his chronology to create "narrative tension" rather than because it's the only way to tell the story (and I put "narrative tension" in quotes because that's not what his technique causes). He opens with one of Archer-Gilligan's borders who thinks he's being poisoned, but he never tells us what happened to that particular man. For reasons that remain entirely opaque to me, the beginning of the book describes the incredible, lethal heat wave of 1911, which--while a fascinating piece of forgotten American history--has nothing whatsoever to do with Amy Archer-Gilligan except for the fact that she was alive and murdering her boarders in Windsor, CT, at the time. He gets horrifically tangled in the chronology of one of Archer-Gilligan's victims, and ends up sneering at the newspapers for getting Smith's age wrong in his obituary, when--to the best of my ability to tell--it's Phelps who's wrong, and that's simply from doing the math on the information he provides. He leaves out bits of the story; for example, there's a gap between the DA saying emphatically it was first-degree murder or nothing and the DA accepting a plea of second-degree murder that makes it impossible to figure out what happened. He is a sloppy writer, using anachronistic slang (like saying Archer-Gilligan "lawyered up" (191) or that something "must have rattled her cage real good" (175)) . And he has the trait that I hate above all others, of using a word that sounds sort of like the right word, but actually means something entirely different, like "emphatically" for "empirically" (154). It happens again and again in this book, and it drives me straight up the wall.

So, fascinating material--and Phelps clearly did a metric fuck-ton of research--but lousy execution, leaving me disappointed and sad. This book could have been so awesome and it just missed its grip.



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Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, Chapter 1

Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press-University Press of New England, 1973.

Chapter 1: Myth and Literature in a New World


Okay, so, first off, it is so very extremely 1973 in this book. Women don't exist; Native Americans have a monolithic culture and no subject position. This is exasperating. However, comma, the reason that this does not cause me to reject the book as not worth my time is that, even though he doesn't say so explicitly (because it's 1973 and he doesn't have to), Slotkin is examining the mythology and myth-making of the white male American. And because in that mythology women don't exist and Native Americans are just the second half of playing Cowboys and Indians, the blind spots in Slotkin's analysis are part of the very thing he's studying. He's demonstrating the myth at the same time he's analyzing it, and that in itself tells you something about how powerful the myth is.

Still, hoo boy and boy howdy, it is all 1973 up in here.

With that said, Slotkin still has things to say that are valuable. Let me quote:

A people unaware of its myths is likely to continue living by them, though the world around that people may change and demand change in their psychology, their world view, their ethics, and their institutions.
(Slotkin 4-5)

And:

It is by now a commonplace that our adherence to the "myth of the frontier"--the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top--has blinded us to the consequences of the industrial and urban revolution and to the need for social reform and a new concept of individual and communal welfare.
(Slotkin 5)

He's more than a little wobbly on the anthropology of how myth is formed--although he does remember to define "myth," which puts him one up on several historians and literary critics I have read. "Myth," in Slotkin's definition, is "a complex of narratives that dramatizes the world vision and historical sense of a people or culture, reducing centuries of experience into a constellation of compelling metaphors" (6). Now, there are enormous problems with this definition, including the idea that a "people" or a "culture" can be treated as a monolithic object, but the big one, and the one that he's wrestling with, is that American mythology isn't reducing "centuries of experience" into an archetypal narrative. When he was writing, America hadn't even made it to its bicentennial, and although you gain another century and a half if you start the clock with the first efforts at colonization, the fact still remains that what Slotkin is looking at isn't mythology as he's just defined it. It's the making of mythology, and part of his problem--I just realized--is that because other cultural mythologies were made in prehistoric eras or in cultures whose myth-making narratives were still primarily oral rather than written, meaning that all we've got are the myths at the point at which they were written down and therefore pinned like butterflies to a display board, he assumes that the myth-making process for them was fundamentally different from the myth-making process in America, rather than merely undocumented.

So there's a bunch of stuff he doesn't understand about how storytelling happens and how it does the cultural work it does, and he throws around terms like "universal archetype" with reckless abandon, but he seems to me to understand very clearly how myth works:

The first colonists saw in American an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation, but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience.
(Slotkin 5)

That part of Slotkin's argument I buy. I don't like the way he fails to distinguish between the subject position of his white male myth-makers and actual reality, and I think he's talking absolute nonsense when he tries to explain how artists create myths, as if the artist's conscious intentions had anything whatsoever to do with whether or not their audiences internalized their metaphors and narratives and made them part of the mythologizing process. (There's another myth that I think he's bought into without consciously being aware of it, which is the myth of the Great Artist.) But I like his distillation of the elements of white male American myth-making in the colonial period:
wilderness vs. paradise (the colonists' perception of the American continent as simultaneously incredibly hostile and incredibly welcoming; "wilderness," for Puritans, is a terrible thing--a better modern analogue would be "wasteland")
the lack of any external controls, in the shape of other technologically advanced civilizations, on expansion
the Native Americans, who were demonized and dehumanized into savage bestial devils (and the Puritans meant "devil" quite literally), who were always poised to attack and who had to be either destroyed or assimilated (i.e., converted, because making them become Christians would of course automatically mean that they would recognize the Puritans as the beloved children of divine providence, the God-ordained masters of the American continent, and become meek and obedient. Of course.)
exile (I think he's quite right to point out that even those colonists who came gladly would be subject to terrible homesickness, and those who didn't choose to return to Europe--because people did go back, it wasn't impossible--would be stuck with that feeling of displacement.)
So if you kind of ignore all the stuff that he's ignoring, because it's 1973 and he can get away with it, both, y'know, the large segments of the human race who don't get subject positions and the responsible use of anthropology and folkloric study (he makes grand sweeping generalizations about the mythologies of prehistoric and/or pre-print cultures and basically never bothers to cite examples), and focus on this as an exploration of white, male, phallocentric, patriarchal mythmaking, he's very good at articulating the patterns of storytelling that start to build the myth of the frontier. And that's the thing I'm reading him for.

UBC, Rule, The I-5 Killer

The I-5 Killer by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This is another get in, get it done, get out account of a serial killer, this one Randall Woodfield, the I-5 Killer, who committed robbery, kidnapping, rape, sodomy (which by its legal definition seems to be an umbrella term for any kind of sex that isn't human-penis-in-human-vagina: Woodfield was fond of fellatio), and murder. He was convicted of the murder of Shari Hull and charged but never prosecuted for the murders of Donna Eckard and Jannell Jarvis (after Woodfield was sentenced to life plus 165 years in the Oregon State Penitentiary, the Shasta County, California, District Attorney decided the ruinous cost of the prosecution wasn't worth the outside chance that Woodfield would not only be sentenced to death but would actually have the sentence carried out). Since Rule's book came out in 1984 (revised edition in 1988) and Woodfield's $12 million libel suit against her was dismissed, he has been linked by DNA testing to the murders of Cherie Ayers, Darci (or Darcey, sources vary) Fix, Douglas Altic, and Julie Reitz (all of whom he was strongly suspected of murdering in 1984).

A lot of murders in America in the twentieth century seemed to have been committed because, as a very broad generalization, there is a significant subset of men who never made the cognitive/psychological leap to understanding that women are human beings who have independent existences, and that that is not wrong. To put it glibly, men whose world view fails the Bechdel Test. And I don't just mean serial killers like Bundy or Brudos or Woodfield, although certainly you can pick that out as an underlying theme in the careers of a number of American serial killers. I'm also thinking of men who stalk and murder ex-girlfriends or ex-wives, or who murder before they even get to the "ex" part. And I'm thinking of Jon Krakauer's book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith, in which a big part of what's going on, both with the Lafferty brothers' turn to Mormon fundamentalism and with their eventual recourse to murder, is the desperate attempts of men who feel entitled to patriarchal control over the female members of their households and see that control slipping away. (For a man like that, his control is always slipping, no matter how obedient his wife (or wives) and daughters try to be. Ron Lafferty turned to the fundamentalist Mormon church because, when he felt he didn't have enough control and reality suggested that perhaps that was because he wasn't supposed to have that kind of micromanaging draconian control, the fundamentalist Mormon church reassured him that, no, it was reality that was wrong.

We have a mismatch, in other words, between two sets of cultural expectations, one that the world works like a fifties sitcom (Father Knows Best, to pick the most obviously, glaringly iconic example), and one that the world is made up of human beings, roughly half of whom are XX and half of whom are XY, and that being one or the other doesn't entitle you to anything. I hope that as the decades roll past, the expectations of patriarchal entitlement will become less ingrained--and less damaging when thwarted, something that little boys can get over, instead of growing up to commit murder simply because their "toys" refuse to wait quietly in the "toybox" when not being played with. No, I'm not saying that all men are like this; I'm saying that a remarkably broad cross-section of men who commit murder are men who murder because it's the only way they can control either one specific woman or, in the case of serial killers, women in general.

Once she's dead, she can't say no. She can't get up and leave. She can't choose another man.

Woodfield used I-5 to spread his crimes out between jurisdictions, ranging from Washington to California. This gave him more time in 1980-81 than it would today, but the law enforcement departments of the I-5 corridor deserve tremendous kudos for figuring out so quickly that they were all looking for the same guy. And for finding him. That's the brighter side to cases like this. For every one guy like Woodfield, there are a dozen or two dozen or three dozen guys who want with every atom of their beings to stop him. And those guys are the reason I read books about guys like Woodfield.





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The Richard Slotkin Reading Club

So here's the deal. I have managed to find all three books of Richard Slotkin's trilogy about the mythology of the frontier in America, Regeneration through Violence, The Fatal Environment, and Gunfighter Nation. These are fat books, an easy 600 pages a piece, and they are academically dense in their language, the sort of books where if you assigned one for a class, you'd space the response assignments out over the whole semester because nobody can just sit down and read the damn thing cover to cover. Your brain would fall out.

Since I want to read these books, what I'm going to do is treat them kind of as if I were reading them for a class: read a chapter, write a commentary, read something else, then come back, read another chapter, write another commentary. The Richard Slotkin Reading Club, membership 1.

I will tag and label these posts (which I am writing essentially for myself) so that they can be avoided by the sensible. But you're certainly free to read them if you want to.

UBC: Wise, The Italian Boy

The Italian Boy: A Tale of Murder and Body Snatching in 1830s London by Sarah Wise

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



This book is amazing. It sets out to do several things, and it does all of them elegantly and in meticulous detail, which is not a common combination.

The central focus of the book is the trial of John Bishop, Thomas Williams (aka Thomas Head and a whole host of other names), and James May for "burking" a vagrant boy. "Burking," from William Burke, means to murder someone for the value of their corpse, specifically in order to sell them to an anatomy school for use in the teaching of dissection. They boy they murdered and hawked around the London medical schools may or may not have been Carlo Ferrari aka Charles Ferrier, an Italian street vagrant in his early teens. Carlo was one of an unknown number of Italian boys who--proving that Dickens' imagination wasn't as good as modern readers might like to think--were brought to England by padroni (for which read Fagin) and sent out into the streets to beg or play instruments or exhibit animals (Carlo was known to have two white mice he kept in a cage strapped to his chest and/or a tortoise) or pick pockets. All proceeds returned to the padroni; the boys were destitute vagrants. And they were only a subset of the vagrant child and adolescent population of London. Bishop and Williams both claimed the boy they were tried for murdering was a drover's boy they found in Smithfield.

So in recounting the course of the trial, Wise is also examining the resurrection trade in London in the 1820s and '30s, examining adolescent vagrancy, and examining the (almost entirely undocumented) lives of the destitute urban poor. Plus the workings of justice. And she's watching London watch itself, as it tries to figure out how to be a city in the brave new world of the Industrial Revolution. Her endnotes are full of the history of the buildings and streets of London, noting which are still there and which were demolished and when and where they were.

This is a fascinating book, beautifully written and lively and full of sympathy for the desperate lives the urban poor were struggling through. She analyses carefully, pulling back to assess the convicted murderers' stories, the various witnesses' stories, the muddle made of the case's forensics, the hypocrisy, visible also in the case of Burke and Hare, where nobody goes on trial or gets put in jail for buying corpses, even if they've bought a corpse they should clearly have been able to tell had never been buried. (In this way, the resurrection trade is much like prostitution.)

If you're interested in nineteenth century London in any capacity, I highly recommend this book.



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Der Winterkaiser

Der Winterkaiser, the German edition of The Goblin Emperor, is out from FISCHER Tor.

Why, no, I am not at all beside myself with glee. Why do you ask?

Photo reference, Young Men and Fire

The Mann Gulch fire, August 5, 1949, killed thirteen men, twelve Smokejumpers and the ranger stationed in Meriwether Gulch. (I find it interesting and sad that while, in 1949, Meriwether Gulch was the tourist attraction that the Forest Service was focused on preserving, today when you Google for it, it only comes up associated with Mann Gulch.)



One of the four men in this picture is William Hellman. In his book Young Men and Fire, Norman Maclean mentions that Hellman "only a month before [the Mann Gulch fire] had made a parachute landing on the Ellipse between the White House and the Washington Monument" (Maclean 29). The person who put this on Pinterest captioned it "Ford Trimotor w/USFS Smokejumpers - including Skip Stratton and William Hellman. This four man crew did a jump on the White House lawn to highlight the new field of Smokejumping."

Skip Stratton, his obituary tells me, was the leader of the crew that retrieved the bodies from Mann Gulch. Merle Stratton, the Smokejumper who got so airsick he didn't make the jump into Mann Gulch, doesn't seem to have been related.



Bill Hellman and Joe Sylvia were the two Smokejumpers who were caught in the fire and survived, horribly burned, for less than 24 hours.


Portraits of all thirteen, from Flickr, here, where the image can be enlarged.

oldmantravels has a bunch more photographs about the Mann Gulch fire in this Flickr album.

And here, by the way, is the website of the National Smokejumper Association.

UBC: Rule, Lust Killer

Lust Killer by Ann Rule

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Long form suits Ann Rule a good deal better, as does having an agenda. There's a reason she's writing about Jerry Brudos, and that reason informs her story-telling.

Her reason, of course, is the same reason that makes The Stranger Beside Me: Ted Bundy The Shocking Inside Story compelling: educating her readers, specifically her young female readers, on the existence of men like Brudos, on the fact that you can't protect yourself from them by being "good" (or "bad," for that matter), and that if one targets you, cooperation almost certainly means your death. Good girls who cooperate are exactly what a man like Brudos wants; it makes them easy prey.

The most horrifying thing about Jerry Brudos is that I'd never heard of him, that there are so many serial killers like him that his name doesn't hold a charge. (The dubious upside to this observation is that it would have infuriated him, Brudos, like others of his ilk, having had a poisonously swollen ego.) If you are interested in serial killers, this is a good case study, clearly written and compelling and, as she quoted from Ted Bundy's letters, she quotes from Brudos' petitions and appeals written in prison--that kind of primary evidence, when available, is certainly the quickest way to get a visceral understanding of how someone like this thinks.

I'm interested in true crime as a genre. This is a good example of how to tell a no-frills story cleanly and concisely. It would be a good choice for representing Ann Rule in a class on twentieth-century American true crime writing.



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N.b., this is the 201st nonfiction book I've reviewed under the unread book challenge tag.

UBC: Rule, In the Name of Love and Other True Cases

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


In the Name of Love: Danville, CA, 1987 (the murder of Jerry Lee Harris and the completely batshit insane plot to kill his wife)
"Murder and the Proper Housewife": Bellevue, WA, 1974 (attempted murder-for-hire, orchestrated by a woman who felt her best friend would be better off with the best friend's husband's trust fund instead of the husband; n.b., the best friend had no idea)
"The Most Dangerous Game": Index, WA, 1971 (sociopath befriends, stalks, and nearly murders two teenage girls)
"How It Feels to Die": Seattle, 1979 (abusive stalker ex-husband comes within a fraction of an inch (or a smattering of cc's of blood) of murdering his ex-wife's three roommates)

Meh.

Mostly, short form is not Ann Rule's A-game. The short pieces (articles instead of books) are flat and kind of aimless. The book-length piece, In the Name of Love, suffered a weird disconnect for me. Rule talks outright about how much she liked Susan Harris and how much she felt she would have liked Jerry Lee Harris, and while I certainly felt sympathy for both of them, I didn't like either of them, and I actually kind of feel I would have disliked Jerry Lee Harris intensely. This is not to say that I think he "deserved" to be murdered or anything of the sort--nor do I think that I need to like the protagonists of a true crime story--but there comes a point as a reader where the more an author tries to make me like a character, the more I set my heels and pin my ears back and refuse to budge. And it makes the experience of reading weird and a little uncomfortable.

Also uncomfortable was her use of "nerd" as a derogatory term to describe the murderer, when (a) even in 1998, "nerd" was a derogatory term only if you were a "jock," Revenge of the Nerds style, and (b) Steve Bonilla is a horrible human being and a complete loser, but he isn't a nerd. He isn't fucking smart enough. (Present tense because, hey, Bonilla is still on death row.)

Basically, Rule and I come from very different social backgrounds, and sometimes the evidence of this in her unexamined assumptions about her readers becomes really jarring.



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