I'll find you
Original title: By Reason of Insanity
Fazi Editore
798 pages, € 19.50
ebook: not reached
Between July and August of 1973 America assists terrified and helpless to the carnage carried out by Vincent Mungo, the most ruthless serial killer who has ever walked on the ground. Escaped from the psychiatric prison where he was imprisoned for a few months, Mungo across the United States from coast to coast, from Los Angeles to New York, leaving behind the remains of dead bodies horribly mutilated. The victims, all young women are tortured, raped, torn apart by a bloody rage unmatched, which is rooted in man's tragic past. His task is a higher mission: the woman is evil, he, the demon hunter, free the world from her abominable presence.
While the trail of blood becomes every day more and more dense, public opinion, shocked by the massacre, he began to wonder why nobody can stop him. Yeah, because no one can follow the trail of Mungo? Why, in spite of his photographs now tappezzino the walls of dozens of towns, no one has ever seen? Why the police, engaged in more extensive manhunt ever deployed on U.S. soil, has not the faintest idea how to predict his next move?
Simple: because the man is making fun of them all, the most savage serial killer in the history of America, not Vincent Mungo.
There are three things that I liked this novel: the first, and worst of all, it's inexcusable delay in the masterpiece, yes, I say this without shame, a masterpiece by Shane Stevens was published in Italy. It's been more than thirty years since By Reason of Insanity , well in advance of a recognized benchmark for the genre as The Silence of the Lambs, The Bone Collector or American Psycho , Inaugurated the literary genre of serial killer in the United States. A praise to Fazi for having delivered a novel of such importance, but a painful reprimand to all the Italian publishing private choice that you all this time.
The second and third are concerned specifically with the Italian edition: the title, I'll find you , is the most banal imaginable and does not make the slightest justice to the original, far more significant, and the cover is totally out context (I would like someone to explain to me where does the idea of \u200b\u200bthe car, because that is not reflected in the novel). And
enough.
I'll find you is a journey into madness of a mind so much disturbed as lucid and implacable: Stevens leads us to hand in a dark and winding maze of mental perversions that are projected out in a slaughter unparalleled. It shows us what remains would like a tour guide with the ruins of the imperial forums. The writing is combined with the record, with the bare facts: there is no moral judgments, not ideological stance. The sheer ease with which we are presented with the gruesome details displaces us, slamming us in the face of the fact that we are about to witness something horribly real, tangible, real. Read here: After years of belts, abuse, physical torture and psychological humiliation, years spent in "a world in which rampant cruelty, pain and death was the norm was a liberation," one who terrorizzerà U.S. kills his mother. He was ten years
in September bought Sara a whip. He said the store owner who thought about buying a horse. He said he would first have to buy the horse, but Sara just bought a whip.
That year the winter came early. Sara and her child were almost always at home and in the big wood stove fire is burning briskly. His mind often wandered: sometimes did not recognize the child, sometimes called by other names [...] The whipping became more frequent.
Then, one evening in late December, the child's mind snapped. He put his mother, still conscious, in the wood stove and watched burn. He watched her body sizzle and burn up to show white bones.
three rows. In three lines Stevens condenses the absolute horror, laying the foundation stone of a building which, after having remained unfinished for many years, will continue to grow at a furious pace after the escape of the killer psychiatric institution.
But not only in excellent writing that lies the greatness of the novel is the structure, rhythm, management themes of the action pauses, accelerations. The awareness of the whole. Stevens patiently paints, stroke after stroke, a complex and fascinating as the serial killer is only one component. There are many characters who populate the novel in fact, each of which is constructed with a sure hand and dashed with great attention to detail: each of them is assigned a specific role in the narrative machine, gears oiled and patiently made available to the reader .
Excellent, very good management plans and narrative points of view: the living and tangible three-dimensionality of the characters, build their dialogue after dialogue, Page after page, is the assembly diagram that is offered to us, so that each gear may be inserted in the right place at the right time. And so, in addition to the main story unfolds as "secondary", but always functional to the economy of the novel and starting point for reflections on issues of great social and media in those years that ignited the minds of the population on all the discussion on the death penalty, which opened as needed and rode after the execution of Caryl Chessman, the notorious (and really existed ) banned the red light, for many serial rapist and sacrifice for others. A performance that will the spark from which everything starts.
Among unscrupulous power-hungry politicians, frustrated detectives, journalists more or less caught up in dirty deals and ex-prisoners more or less redeemed in the second half of the novel shows the bulky figure of Adam Kenton, investigative reporter hired by Newstime to find the murderess before the police. He is the second largest magnetic pole around which everything converges, the alter ego of the killer, his most ruthless hunter and perhaps the only one able to understand the twisted and tormented psyche. The absolute and fanatical dedication with which he devoted himself generally seen as a mission impossible is second only to the Devil in California dedicated to its victims and its delusional plan for purification of the world, mirroring a thirst for power that, ultimately, is the driving force of all the events that are interwoven in the novel.
But, of course, he is the protagonist, Vincent Mungo, or, just as we know from the outset, Thomas Bishop. I rarely have come across a character with so much narrative power. Somewhere I think I read that Bishop Thomas Hannibal Lecter was like it was described by Truman Capote. I assure you it is much more.
The beginning
The flames greedily devoured the body, tearing and eating the flesh and muscles. Flaked, then blackened and charred, the skin fell apart quickly. Arms, legs and torso would soon be reduced to a pile of bleached bones on fire. And, in due course, the head, deprived of physical traits, it would become like a skull.
In silence, if not for that sing-song wail that went up from the bottom of the throat, the boy, his mad eyes lit by the red glow of the flames, watching the body burn, burn, burn ...
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