Wouldn't you like to be a killer, too?

"Killing is just murder without a license."
                                         ---- Charles Bronson, The Mechanic


Many years ago the socialist poet W.H. Auden, writing appropos of the Spanish Civil War, penned the following lines:

Today the deliberate increase in the chances of death
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
          Today the expanding of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.

Auden was in these verses contrasting two sides of a revolutionist's coin; banality and brutality. Handing out pamphlets and attending dull Party meetings on one side; cold-blooded killing of enemies on the other. Both integral, Auden suggests, to the life of a revolutionary. But although Auden's contemporary, George Orwell, enjoyed the poem -- calling it "one of the few decent things that have been written about the Spanish War" -- its particular phraseology annoyed him. In his essay "Inside the Whale" he explained why:

"But notice the phrase 'necessary murder.' It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. It so happens I have seen the bodies of numbers of murdered men -- I don't mean killed in battle, I mean murdered. Therefore I have some conception of what murder means -- the terror, the hatred, the howling relatives, the post-mortems, the blood, the smells...Mr. Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot....Warmongering...[is] largely based on a sense of personal immunity."

Orwell's irritation with Auden is both unfair and completely understandable. On the one hand he is criticizing Auden for having the audacity to write about a subject with which he has no firsthand experience -- rather a cheap-shot to take, when one considers that such disparite but classic works as The Red Badge of Courage and Lord of the Rings were also written without "firsthand experience", and that Auden's "Spain" is less an attempt to exploit the revolutionist's experience than simply to comment upon it. On the other, Orwell served five years in Burman with the Imperial Police, and some months in Spain as a foot-soldier on the Republican side. As a police officer in a half-savage colony he became intimately acquainted with murder; as an infantryman during a hard-fought civil war he was shot through the neck and killed at least one man in battle. He knew more about murder and killing and bloodshed than most men, and took umbrage at those who understood them only in the academic sense.

I can relate. In fact, I have always viewed myself as a kind of feeble Orwellian echo. Like him, by virtue of a unusual childhood and an unsuitable but deeply affecting profession, I have acquired life-experiences which make it difficult to witness or read about certain subjects without bristling like a riled-up junkyard dog. In particular I find myself irritated by people who, like Auden, choose to view murder as merely a word; who are elsewhere when the trigger is pulled; who film or write the most explicit violence while at the same time harboring that sense of personal immunity which I no longer possess.

When I think of Jack Ketchum, I don't think of Joyride or Red or The Girl Next Door; I think of a black-and-white picture of him which shows him head-down, a cigarette between his lips and the collar of his heavy overcoat turned up, apparently against the rain. It's a Noirish picture, darkly romantic, tough somehow, and very appropriate when you consider the subject matter of his novels, and I can't help but think, seeing it, that this is probably how he sees himself -- as a literary tough guy not afraid to take a long walk in the dark, and to navigate hell by the light of a Marlboro. Unfortunately, I cannot see him that way. The things he dreams about, broods about, writes about, are things that I know in a way he probably cannot begin to understand.

Like Orwell, my conception of what murder means -- especially casual murder, random murder, "spree killing" as the newspapers inevitably call it -- is different from the average person's. I have stood in pathology labs and watched skulls cracked open like crab claws, watched brains diced by carving knives, watched internal organs yanked out of body cavities in bloody heaps; I have wiped away gore from my own face when the pathologist's assistant became too enthusastic with the circular saw; I have spoken with victims of rape and attempted murder whose scars are still pink upon their flesh; and I have, on one occasion, felt a bullet pass by my own skin. I don't profess to be an expert on these things; I merely state that I have experienced them. I don't know much, but I know that fire is hot.

As an examination of the spree killer, the man who, after years of banal below-the-radar existence, or perhaps after a lifetime of minor and seemingly harmless eccentricity, erupts in murderous violence and takes the lives of half a dozen, a dozen, twenty people before being brought down by police bullets or -- less satisfyingly -- putting a final round in his own brain or ushering himself meekly into custody, I'd say Joyride is pretty effective. There is a flat, tinny, existential quality to the type of killer that Wayne Lock represents; the sense that we are dealing with a man so unjustifiably self-involved that like a black hole, he is defined by the effect he has rather than what he is. A two-dimensional mediocrity in his own life, he assumes a temporary outsize importance by taking the lives of others -- power in its simplest and stupidest form. And like a good existentialist, he leaves just enough survivors to ensure that the effect of what he has done will linger on for years and decades after he himself is food for the maggots -- immortality at its ugliest and most unimaginative. The selfish, lugubrious character of the killer seem appropriate, fitting, realistic. Because let's face it, the motives of such people usually are quite boring; they exist in rude counterpoint to the spattering frenzy that marks their final hours.

What's more, Ketchum seems determined from the outset not merely to recount the doings of Lock but to examine to some extent the very concept of murder itself.  Even when the act itself is recognized as murder and not killing -- the death of Howard, for example -- Ketchum allows for the idea that murder, like evil, can come with both a capital and a lower-case version. Like Thomas Harris, who closed out Red Dragon with the words: "There is no murder. We make murder, and it matters only to us", Ketchum is unafraid to tackle rather stark fact that murder, when you get down to it, is simply a word to describe the unsanctioned killing of a human being. Howard Unruh, the real-life mass-murderer on whom Lock was partially based, was a highly decorated veteran of World War II; a man who had done his share of sanctioned killing before he infamously went on his rampage of the unsanctioned variety. Indeed, when the aptly-named Rule is bulleting down the highway at the story's opening, he reflects on the insects dying quick ugly deaths against his windshield -- against the impossibility of going through life without killing. This is a theme that recurs so often in everything from religious ceremony (Bhuddists, for example, apologizing for the bugs they have stepped on in the course of the day) to speculative science fiction (the pacifistic Spock commenting in Star Trek that "In a sense we all feed on death, even vegetarians.") that one wonders why it never seems to break the surface of ordinary conversation. The answer to that is of course that in a civilized society and form of killing beyond the pulling-up of weeds or the swatting of a mosquito is looked upon with disgust. A person loading their shopping cart with beef is about as likely to make the mental connection between those plastic-sheathed styrofoam containers and a cow having its throat slit as they are between the ribbon on a soldier's chest and the heap of corpses that ribbon may represent. We have built a wall, albeit an artifical wall, between ourselves and the fact that our reality is to a certain extent supported on bones -- bones of people, bones of animals. Joyride's opening lines demolish that wall. Rule lets us know in no uncertain terms that to kill is to live, and to live is to kill.

And yet I can't shake the feeling that in this novel, as in several of his others, perhaps, Ketchum is playing with fire. Poking a stick into a raw nerve to see what effect it produces, without, as it were, having to actually listen to the screams. It is all well and good to detail the casual murder of a couple of young students, even going so far as to explain the murderers' joy in the taking-away of the the potentiality of their lives, and knowing precisely the shock effect it will have on the reader; it is quite another to be unable, as I am unable, to view the description of such killings as mere words. I have no sense of personal immunity; I do not want a sense of personal immunity. When I write the death of a character, even a throwaway character, I am fully conscious of the heat of the flames. And this brings me to my main point, which I think was quite aptly summed up by one review of the novel I read online, which said:

"What Ketchum does, he does very well, but what he does is often brutal, nihilistic, and ultimately so without hope or optimism...and Joyride is no exception...it's also so grim and hopeless that the cumulative effect can be hard to take, and in the end, there are legitimate questions about whether the books are confronting evil or reveling in it."

Indeed there are, my friend. And this question really must be levied at many people who claim, with varying degrees of apparent sincerity, that they are simply examining violence and not shaking pom-poms at it. 
Filmmakers like Stanley Kubrick, Michael Haencke, Sam Peckninpah and Quentin Tarantino are all people who have made me suspect that if caught watching porn, they would go into a lengthly diatribe about its value as a barometer of human sexuality rather than simply admitting they like jerking off to it. You like watching a woman beaten and raped, you like seeing people set on fire, you like hearing some poor kid slobber unsuccessfully for mercy, have the guts to admit it and don't waste my motherfucking time with pedantic-sounding excuses. And please for Christ's sake don't drag "art" into it, as if the mere invocation of the word were some kind of ghost-shirt that rendered the wearer immune from attack. As Orwell himself said, appropos of Salvadore Dali: "What the defenders of Dali are claiming is a kind of benefit of clergy. The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws which are binding on ordinary people." He goes on, "One ought to be able to hold in one's head the two facts that Dali is at once a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being. The one does not invalidate, or, in a sense, affect the other. The first thing we demand of a wall is that it should stand up. if it does it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separate from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp. In the same way it should be possible to say, 'This is a good book or a good picture, and it ought to be burned by the public hangman.' Unless one can say that...one is shirking the implications that an artist is also a citizen and a human being."

Allow me to example. Some years ago, either during or immediately after I resigned from my job as an investigator for the District Attorney, I began a short story called "Identity Crisis." I was unable to finish it because the climax of the story, as I had unwillingly envisioned it, involved a mass murder carried out by the anomie-riddled antihero. The story worked, but it seemed to have no real purpose, no real moral; and I couldn't escape the feeling that I was somehow glorifying -- or at least tacitly endorsing -- the actions of the villain. Later I altered the story so that the character, who as the title suggest suffers from a persistent and ever-growing feeling that he does not exist, accidentally blows himself up en route to his massacre, and being charred beyond recognition is logged by the coroner as a "John Doe." When I finished the re-write I was delighted to see that this one-killing story was not only more effective than the high body count version, it was, oddly enough, possessing of greater impact. Somehow the attempt of the antihero to make himself visible achieving the exact opposite resonated more than the slaughter I'd originally planned; but I only got to that point because of my instinctive reluctance to spill blood simply for its own sake. It wasn't enough to talk, I had to say something.

Don't misunderstand here. Nearly everything I write contains bloodshed, some of it quite horribly explicit, and if Orwell were alive and persuaded to read some of things I've written I've no doubt whatever he would hurl more than one piece into the same bonfire he intended for Dali's 'Mannequin rotting in a taxicab.'
The module I taught at my last residency at SHU was called, quite simply, "Writing Violence", and it wasn't for the faint of heart. I did my double-damndest to make an art of that particular science and I trust I came within screaming distance of succeeding. So you could say with some accuracy that I am not only being unreasonable but also a big-ass hypocrite for condeming a horror-writer simply because he has probably never seen somebody with a half-healed gunshot wound. This is a valid point, but so is the last one I'm about to make, which is that an analysis of murder -- and I think Joyride qualifies -- has to take the final step and make a conclusion. Ketchum is obligated to tell us whether he is confronting evil or reveling in it, examining the motivations of Wayne Lock or simply working up a sex-sweat writing about them.