AM I TEACHING PEOPLE HOW TO KILL?
So here I am, a week into my tour for THE MOONLIT EARTH, and enjoying the heck out of Little Rock - the latter of which surprised me, to be frank - when a reader at my discussion asks me a very simple question, but one fraught with...er...implications, shall we say? "In Blind Fall you include a lot of information on how to kill a person. Are you concerned that maybe you're, uh, teaching people how to kill?" To be honest, the question was asked with the utmost respect but the chill that went through me was palpable.
Stephen King, upon learning that one of his novellas about a school shooting has been found in the locker of a real-life school shooter, yanked the title off the shelves. My mother, Anne Rice, has bent over backwards to distance herself from any real life practices of vampirism. No, I don't seek to compare myself to either King or Mi Madre. These are just two well known examples of writers taking some responsibility for the real-life ripple effects their fiction might make in the world outside their minds. Fact is most writers take the opposite approach. I'm told A.M. Homes when asked whether or not her writings about a pedophile might inspire some real ones said something along the lines of... Are knife makers held responsible for stabbings?
My response falls somewhere in between. For the record, the killing techniques described in Blind Fall are actually taken from Marine Corps defensive training techniques, and John Houck, the Marine in question, is only pretending to teach Alex Martin how to kill. (For those of you who haven't read the book, John has just learned that the comrade who saved his life in Iraq was secretly gay. What's more? The guy had a boyfriend, Alex. What's MORE?? His comrade has just been murdered and he and Alex have learned the identity of the killer.) John is convinced Alex is going to set about getting his revenge in a stupid and reckless manner if he doesn't take the guy under his wing. So his promise to "teach Alex how to kill" is actually just a ploy, an attempt to bring Alex around to his way of thinking while immersing him in a simulated training environment in the Arizona wilderness.
But back to the question at hand. Here's a basic breakdown of how I answered during my talk. 1. The information I used is out there and readily available to anyone with homicidal tendencies. No national secrets were spilled. No wildly complex instructions on how to build an explosive were made suddenly accessible to the masses by my sterling prose. 2. I write dark material specifically so I can address my fears and anxieties about certain issues. Like how easy it is to kill someone, and the frightening number of people who are willing to try. And lastly - or 3, if you're a stickler for consistency - I'm actually kind of a wuss when it comes to extremely violent material in films and books which I feel should give me sort of a pass on this question over all.
Email my good friend, writer Gregg Hurwitz, and ask him how I responded a few years back when he called to see if I wanted to go with him to see Saw II. It wasn't pretty. The torture porn phenomenon - which actually seems to be on the wane following the dismal box office of Eli Roth's second Hostel film - pretty much scared me away from horror films all together. But let's be honest here. This doesn't have anything to do with moral high ground, perceived or otherwise. In my second novel, I killed a character by suffocating him in hot wax. I just didn't make you suffer through each excruciating moment of his death. But there are plenty of things in my novels that make certain people drop the book and grip the arms of their chair as they gasp for breath. (It continues to amaze me, however, that most of these things have to do with sexuality and not violence. I continue to be stunned that I live in a country where films depicting intense, consensual sexuality are saddled with NC-17 ratings while skinning people alive gets you an R.)
What am I getting at here? I like dark stuff. I write dark stuff. I support the right of all consenting adults to watch and read dark stuff, even the stuff I can't make myself sit through. But am I teaching people how to kill? I don't know. Ask all those people who have murdered people based on the directions they received from Blind Fall. Oh. That's right. There aren't any.
(This post was written with the utmost respect for the gentleman from Little Rock who asked this question in the first place. Thanks for coming, thanks for reading my book, and thanks for not killing anyone : )
Get more on Christopher Rice at SimonandSchuster.com
Stephen King, upon learning that one of his novellas about a school shooting has been found in the locker of a real-life school shooter, yanked the title off the shelves. My mother, Anne Rice, has bent over backwards to distance herself from any real life practices of vampirism. No, I don't seek to compare myself to either King or Mi Madre. These are just two well known examples of writers taking some responsibility for the real-life ripple effects their fiction might make in the world outside their minds. Fact is most writers take the opposite approach. I'm told A.M. Homes when asked whether or not her writings about a pedophile might inspire some real ones said something along the lines of... Are knife makers held responsible for stabbings?
My response falls somewhere in between. For the record, the killing techniques described in Blind Fall are actually taken from Marine Corps defensive training techniques, and John Houck, the Marine in question, is only pretending to teach Alex Martin how to kill. (For those of you who haven't read the book, John has just learned that the comrade who saved his life in Iraq was secretly gay. What's more? The guy had a boyfriend, Alex. What's MORE?? His comrade has just been murdered and he and Alex have learned the identity of the killer.) John is convinced Alex is going to set about getting his revenge in a stupid and reckless manner if he doesn't take the guy under his wing. So his promise to "teach Alex how to kill" is actually just a ploy, an attempt to bring Alex around to his way of thinking while immersing him in a simulated training environment in the Arizona wilderness.
But back to the question at hand. Here's a basic breakdown of how I answered during my talk. 1. The information I used is out there and readily available to anyone with homicidal tendencies. No national secrets were spilled. No wildly complex instructions on how to build an explosive were made suddenly accessible to the masses by my sterling prose. 2. I write dark material specifically so I can address my fears and anxieties about certain issues. Like how easy it is to kill someone, and the frightening number of people who are willing to try. And lastly - or 3, if you're a stickler for consistency - I'm actually kind of a wuss when it comes to extremely violent material in films and books which I feel should give me sort of a pass on this question over all.
Email my good friend, writer Gregg Hurwitz, and ask him how I responded a few years back when he called to see if I wanted to go with him to see Saw II. It wasn't pretty. The torture porn phenomenon - which actually seems to be on the wane following the dismal box office of Eli Roth's second Hostel film - pretty much scared me away from horror films all together. But let's be honest here. This doesn't have anything to do with moral high ground, perceived or otherwise. In my second novel, I killed a character by suffocating him in hot wax. I just didn't make you suffer through each excruciating moment of his death. But there are plenty of things in my novels that make certain people drop the book and grip the arms of their chair as they gasp for breath. (It continues to amaze me, however, that most of these things have to do with sexuality and not violence. I continue to be stunned that I live in a country where films depicting intense, consensual sexuality are saddled with NC-17 ratings while skinning people alive gets you an R.)
What am I getting at here? I like dark stuff. I write dark stuff. I support the right of all consenting adults to watch and read dark stuff, even the stuff I can't make myself sit through. But am I teaching people how to kill? I don't know. Ask all those people who have murdered people based on the directions they received from Blind Fall. Oh. That's right. There aren't any.
(This post was written with the utmost respect for the gentleman from Little Rock who asked this question in the first place. Thanks for coming, thanks for reading my book, and thanks for not killing anyone : )
Get more on Christopher Rice at SimonandSchuster.com
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