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The Weekend Butler: An image 55 million light years away, Jeffrey Epstein and alligators, blind gun owners in Iowa, and a novel scarier than ‘Silence of the Lambs’
Published: Mar 31, 2021
Category:
Weekend
THE IMAGE: TAKE A LOOK AT SOMETHING 55 MILLION LIGHT YEARS AWAY
A new phrase for me: event horizon. It’s a brain-splitting concept: In astrophysics, it’s the point of no return around a black hole; beyond the event horizon, all light and matter is consumed. For some years an Event Horizon Telescope has been trained on a black hole “6.5 billion times as massive as the sun. It lies in the center of an enormous elliptical galaxy, Messier 87, about 55 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo.” In The Most Intimate Portrait Yet of a Black Hole , The Times delivers a thrilling portrait of “this finely whiskered vortex, like the spinning fan blades of a jet engine, pumping matter into the black hole and energy outward into space.”
STRANGER THAN FICTION
– In Iowa, the blind can now get gun permits.
– Is there a crime Jeffrey Epstein wouldn’t commit? Apparently not. This one involves the repeated rape of a young real estate broker in her son’s presence, a threat to feed her to alligators, and coerced sex with other men. And Ghislaine Maxwell? Allegedly a willing collaborator.
THE WEEKEND MOVIE
John Farr founded the Bedford Playhouse, a state-of-the-art theater that is the single best reason to travel to Westchester County. He’s seen everything. And I can testify: he doesn’t lack for opinions. These are his favorite “under the radar” films of the last five years.
THE WEEKEND POEM: MAN WITH WOODEN LEG ESCAPES PRISON
(from James Tate’s Selected Poems)
Man with wooden leg escapes prison. He’s caught.
They take his wooden leg away from him. Each day
he must cross a large hill and swim a wide river
to get to the field where he must work all day on
one leg. This goes on for a year. At the Christmas
Party they give him back his leg. Now he doesn’t
want it. His escape is all planned. It requires
only one leg.
THE SCARIEST NOVEL: THE KILLER INSIDE ME
The first time I read this book, I wasn’t right for days.
This is not an uncommon experience.
The killer is Lou Ford, deputy sheriff of Central City, Texas (population: 48,000).
He’s a sociopath.
He knows it.
And… he’s the narrator.
How twisted is Lou? This book leaves Silence of the Lambs in the dust. Blame it on the sex — the violent sex and the violence after sex. Hannibal Lecter may kill, but he’s cool and scientific about it, and because “Silence” has a third-person narrator with some restraint, we don’t see him eating someone’s liver and fava beans as he drinks a nice Chianti.
But because Lou Ford is our tour guide, we see his murders from inches away. Relatively speaking, it’s no big deal when he kills a man. It’s what Lou does to women that’s truly sickening: overwhelming them, beating them, punishing them, humiliating them. We’re chained to his point-of-view, so his sick, violent misogyny involves and implicates us. And, possibly, worse: turns us on in sick places we never knew we had.
Critics sometimes defend books like this on the grounds that they are “moral” tales. And the novel does scream that Lou Ford isn’t just sick, he’s evil. Stanley Kubrick, a film director who knew a thing or three about evil, called this “probably the most chilling and believable first-person story of a criminally warped mind I have ever encountered.” That’s because Jim Thompson, who also wrote “The Grifters” and “The Getaway,” had no problem looking into the darkest reaches of the human soul and mirthlessly presenting what he found — that is, violence, corruption and nihilism.
Thompson knocked off “The Killer Inside Me” in just four weeks. Published in 1952, it was a shocker, and not just because of the violence and the sex. The character himself is disturbing. Lou Ford is the kind of dullard you do anything to avoid — he spouts the most inane cliches, he’s Mr. Hearty to one and all, he’s so damn friendly and boring he drives everybody crazy. What nobody gets: He’s really a kind of genius who acts like a dope on purpose. All to keep them from guessing that, when no one is looking, he’s a serial killer who’s kinky as hell. [To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
And then there’s the writing, which is as blunt as the brutality it describes. Like this:
She still didn’t get it. She laughed, frowning a little at the same time.
“But Lou — that doesn’t make sense. How could I be dead when…?”
“Easy,” I said. And I gave her a slap. And still she didn’t get it.
She put a hand to her hand to her face and rubbed it slowly.
“Y-you’d better not do that, now, Lou. I’ve got to travel, and —”
“You’re not going anywhere, baby,” I said, and I hit her again.
And then she got it.
Why read such horrifying, disgusting stuff? Precisely because it’s so acutely rendered — no writer creates psychopaths more compelling than Jim Thompson. And no writer I can think of can put you inside a sicko’s head as totally as Thompson. You may not like what he has to say, but you have to admire his ability to say it.
This book gives new definition to the phrase “guilty pleasure.” Just make sure you don’t have to be anywhere after you start reading it — if you don’t put it down out of squeamishness, you’re not going to be able to tear yourself away from “The Killer Inside Me.”
