10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Spectacle & Action: Harold Jaffe's Brilliant Public Fiction, February 5, 2004
This review is from: 15 Serial Killers: Docufictions (Paperback)
Every culture is obsessed with sex and death. But American Puritanism makes us squeamish when we imagine both at the same time. We take Paris Hilton and the DC snipers in separate doses.
Serial killers bridge the realms of sex and death. And, by adding Americans' love for celebrity to the mix, they become superstars. Aileen Wournos is just the latest example.
Yet we need to deny our fascination. We pretend to read the papers for our edification, not the gory details. So we look at the fragments, and we can't -- or won't -- put the pieces together.
Harold Jaffe can and does. In his new book, 15 SERIAL KILLERS, Jaffe -- a master at public fiction -- pushes the full dimensions of our prurience -- and the subjects and objects of our perverse fantasies -- straight into our own consciousness.
Jaffe's book presents "docufictions," in which he delineates the lives and crimes of serial killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Kissinger, the Son of Sam, Charles Manson, and Dr. Jack Kevorkian.
The portraits include summations of events, detailed backstories, and "interviews" of the kind that make these killers stars.
Jaffe probes the mass murderers' similarities -- and their individuality. In so doing, he uncovers their grotesque cultural significance.
In his previous book, the deeply probing FALSE POSITIVE, Jaffe explored current events -- from road rage to Mideast violence. His mastery of public fiction allows him to mine the underlying "politicalness" of events and occurences, which makes his stories of headline-grabbing killers in his latest book both startling and unnerving.
Yet Jaffe also has a great grasp of story. In "Lonely Hearts," a more-than-twisted Nathanael West tale, Jaffe tells the story of Martha Beck and Ramon Fernandez, ballroom dancers who seduce lonely widows with money. It is both road story and romance. Martha is jealous of Ramon. Ramon is obsessively vain about his hairpiece. In the end, he kills Martha, then himself. In this story, limning the lives of largely unknown killers, Jaffe strikes a fine balance betwen the deeply personal and the deeply American sense of thwarted longing.
When he returns to the more wholly public sphere, Jaffe is equally skilled. He skewers the relationship betwen Nixon and Kissinger: "Iago and Iago."
Jaffe describes the private turmoil of his killers, creating -- yes -- sympathy for his characters alongside his penetrating public insights.
In these docufictions, we learn equally of John Wayne Gacy's successful management of a KFC franchise, of the Yonkers' Police Department's "media grab" in the arrest of the Son of Sam, of Ted Bundy's delight in biting his victims, and of the "game show' nature of current American "reality," as fictional hosts ask banal questions of their murderous guests.
The cumulative effect is one of a mixed mayhem -- public and private -- that we typically ignore.
Jaffe is fundamentally an epistemologist. He strikes hard at the core of what we know and how we know it in our "information age." His narrative strategies serve his ends well and they provoke, agitate, and ultimately compel.
We emerge from our immersion in the lives and aftermaths of these killers questioning not only our collective values, our assumptions, our way of looking at what we know about the world, but also questioning ourselves. When we reach the end of these 15 bone-chilling portraits, we must ask ourselves: do we ("God forbid")identify with any of these characters? These monsters?
That we get to ask this question at all is a great testimony to the success of this book.
15 SERIAL KILLERS is another Harold Jaffe masterpiece.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Get to Know 15 Serial Killers, October 30, 2003
This review is from: 15 Serial Killers: Docufictions (Paperback)
15 Serial Killers is an edgy, innovative collection of short stories that often reads like true crime. Jaffe's unflinching yet non-judgemental treatment of the sadistic details is both disturbing and thought provoking. The concept of a "Docufiction" is to fictionalize real events and people, often giving a clearer view into the chaotic mind of the killer than any book-length factual account could.
Although Jaffe employs many different formats; dialog, monologue, talk show transcript, there is still a pronounced completeness to the book. These 15 different stories explore the relationship between the serial killer as an individual and society's fascination with them.
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Disturbing and Hard-Hitting, October 31, 2003
By A Customer
This review is from: 15 Serial Killers: Docufictions (Paperback)
This book grabs you right from the get-go, dropping you into the scene of the crime in a way unlike any I've read before: the "docufiction" approach merges the newsstories with a fictional re-enactment that immerses the reader in the reality of the murders in an intriguing way. This is what true crime fiction SHOULD do, but doesn't, because it's so repressed and interested in the lawful side of non-fiction. Here Jaffe expresses himself freely -- even as he is clearly writing in an objective manner, keeping the narrator out of the picture in each character study. 15 SERIAL KILLERS is a fascinating literary experiment even as it's a disturbing horrorshow, entering into the scene of the crime and the twisted methods and mentations of fifteen of the world's most notorious serial killers. Dahmer, Gacy, Bundy, Gein... they're all here for the party. Highly recommended.
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