It is here we get to the truth that underlies and pulses through the story of 112 Ocean Avenue. Not the truth about if DeFeo Jr was possessed by an evil force that compelled him to kill his family, not the truth about if the Lutz's really experienced a haunting by the same spirit.
What Urquhart does do though is give us a more rounded an believable serial killer for our protagonist to fight. She leaves aside the grandising of the serial killer as some kind of terrible, yet infalible not quite human figuer in the shadows, an inversion of the great man fallacy, and instead show us someone who is not as clever as he thinks, or wishes to be.
This week on a podcast only episode Mairi interviews Jack Lutz, author of London in Black, a near-future novel about crime and society in London after a biochemical attack. They talk crime fiction, London, names and flawed detectives.
This kind of elitism and snobbishness has always existed in the arts. However what the many who tightly cling to this sense of superiority do not realise is that it is only very recently that realism has crept into literature - think about Homer, Beowulf, Shakespeare with his Wyrd Sisters, Titania and Oberon. Human beings have always enjoyed a good dose of the mysterious, miraculous, mythological and the unexplainable in our stories.
As someone who does not believe in an afterlife with punishment editions, and also would not strictly adhear to conventional ideas of reincarnation, death to me has always appeared to be a release from suffering. So the obsession with death as a punishment, the ultimate punishment, has always puzzled me, surely if punishment is really what you want then creating a worse life on earth is what is called for - and as we can see throughout history, we are really, really good at doing that.
Availible to pre-order through the TCF Bookshop. Profits go to support independent retailers and True Crime fiction Death's Kiss, by Josh Reynolds is published on 1st June by Aconyte and is a crime novel set in the fantasy world of the Legend of the Five Rings role playing game, which is losely based on feudal …
Since Ted Bundy's death by electric chair in 1989 a veritable industry has grown up around him. One I am sure he would be pretty pleased with as he was an inveterained antention-monger. Most of what the recent Bundy circus has thrown up is the realisation (yet again) that really, really good looking people can …
Continue reading Audiobook review: The Phantom Prince, my Life With Ted Bundy, Updated and Expanded.
