The Joy of Killing by Harry MacLean

Author:Harry MacLean [N. MacLean, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619026452
Publisher: Counterpoint

BING! THE BELL goes. A half page has gone by. I nod my head. The kid was doing all right, for a beginner. He’s a natural. At least this night. I push the carriage to the right. I close my eyes, to play out the rest of the scene, my fingers skipping over the keys.

MY EYES SWING over to The Joy of Killing. Bright red letters on white. The Professor’s memoir was quite remarkably stitched together, a compellingly told story from inside the mind of a remorseless killer. Hard to believe he was an academic. In my novel, he had earned a second PhD in anthropology, and his study in this area greatly affected his philosophy. His initial area of focus had been the early crop civilizations in the Fertile Crescent, when man had learned to plant wheat and rye, which meant that he could store them and take the winter off. It allowed him to settle down and not spend all of his time hunting for his next meal. He had time for art and music and community. He began painting and writing stories and composing music, which gave him memory and hope and capacities beyond simple survival. It also gave him time to develop a broader range of emotional strategies beyond reduction of fear and procreation. He began to possess a woman, rather than just breed her out of instinct. He had his own home, his own plot of land, and now he had the time and energy to fight to protect them. The freedom to act from pure instinct had been lost by this shift. Emotional strategies were woven into all behavior now; anger became the critical feeling, for it drove the various forms of violence, retaliation, and retribution. Theft. Assault. Murder. Rape. The primitive mind began evolving into a process of weaving instincts into emotional landscapes. It had to. If a neighbor began sleeping with your wife, you were more effective if you responded with anger; you would do a better job of making him pay in a way that would discourage him or anyone else from doing it again. Even better if you could make him feel guilty over what he did. If his wife and children shamed him for it. If he felt remorse over it. Instinct, while critical, was no longer the linchpin. And if you slept with his wife, you predicted—and here was the key element of the Professor’s doctoral thesis and subsequent scholarly efforts—you predicted that you would not feel bad for having done it; or rather, that the joy you felt while and after screwing her would far outweigh any negative feelings, such as guilt at having used the woman to get even with the man. Predicting correctly is the definition of wisdom.

Under the Professor’s theory, the reason I failed to stick an ice pick in the back of my first wife was because I understood that the momentary joy arising from having committed the most forbidden of all acts

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