Rating: 
Summary: Get to Know 15 Serial Killers
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Spectacle & Action: Harold Jaffe's Brilliant Public Fiction
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Spectacle & Action: Harold Jaffe's Brilliant Public Fiction
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Killers on the loose
Review: Harold Jaffe's 15 Serial Killers actually scared me. 15 docufictions tales written so well that I truly believed I stood within touching distance of famous slayers. I very strongly urge you to read this book, but only when the lights are bright and help is only a scream away.
Rating:
Summary: It's a matter of style
Review: Harold Jaffe's 15 Serial Killers is the logical extension of his 2002 collection False Positive, in which he variously "treated" newspaper stories in order to reveal the hidden assumptions beneath and behind them. And not just journalists' assumptions, but our own. This project is extended into the favorite realm of the newspaper: celebrities who are "bad," in this case primarily serial killers. But other "bad" celebrities also sprinkle these stories: Madonna has sex with Henry Kissinger and Idi Amin and a strap-on; Dennis Wilson swipes Manson's songs; National Book Award-winner and famous auto-erotic aspyxiator, plagiarist, and transvestite Jerzy Kosinski is conflated with Theodore Kaczynski; Kissinger lectures Duchamp on art. The travesties associated with all celebrity seem on target. Perhaps serial killers are just the most obvious examples.
Jaffe seems less to be setting out to "shock" or "horrify" us readers than to be relating these accounts in several ways that really tame any potential shock we would feel. Only three of these fictions are told from the point of view of the killer: the rest distance the killer in third person or use alternating first and third persons in an interview style that has us identify with the interviewer. This results in our identifying the killers as "them," while we can retain some of the complacency of "us." As a matter of fact, these "docufictions" seem to intentionally massage our complacency in the face of the ho-hum horrors of our times in order to then have us see them in ourselves.
Or so it could be if this were meant to be a mimetic text. But to read Jaffe this way-that is, to discuss his work only by focusing on his subject matter-is perhaps a mistake. After Robbe-Grillet, does subject matter really matter? After Beckett, hasn't subject matter become? What matters is the writing itself.
So what of Jaffe's prose? It is not merely "treated" newspaper writing. The stories contain authorial and editorial insinuations and intrusions, slight turns of phrase that reveal the hand of the writer at work, that move this work beyond its subject matter. I would trust Jaffe as I would Robbe-Grillet. I would rather read five of their pages about a smushed centipede or Charo than I would one of the latest obviously-plotted, winking-at-Hollywood Brand-X Pop Novel. In "Dr. K," the ostensible Kissinger piece, for example, Jaffe writes, "You've seen his Kopf. He wears a size eight-and-a-half hat, which is almost unheard of. Outside D.C." That is not any average newspaper writing. It is an example of style. Flair. Jaffe is not afraid to show his hand.
We may be challenged from time to time to find it in any one piece-where in the fiction/nonfiction interface is "originality," but I think here the question also goes astray. Why should I fancy "originality" to even be a possibility? Isn't our society's social fabric itself merely an illusion? How can anything come of nothing? Is the very notion of "originality" just an elitist put-on meant to keep the elitists up there and us schlubs down here? Question "authority," right? Doesn't that mean, "question the author"? I would feel more uncomfortable if Jaffe wrote his fictions as straightforward third-person narratives. Only three here are truly in third person, and they aren't very straightforward. Straightforward third-person narrative is all hand-holdy and creepy: Take my hand, dear little reader, you who hold my hand, and I will show you the wonders of my world. Yuck! Thank you, Hal, for giving us something to read that actually engages thought. So many readers and writers out there seem to dedicate themselves to soft little comfy chair stories of the wonders of the writer's world, imagined or real. Bridges of Madison County crap. I wish many of more of us wandered out here to reading the real stuff. Jaffe is the real stuff. When Jaffe writes that cannibal Ed Kemper says, "a hero has to be made with Italian bread. What I ate professed to be French," we see the hand of a true stylist. Who cares if he writes about serial killers or cereal fillers? As long as lines like "Yonkers cops decide to cop the glory" and "Lee drinks Coors Lite to keep the calories down, make her more appealing to the highway johns, but the thing is she drinks a whole lot and the watery brew makes her pee" find a seam in Jaffe's texts, they'll keep us reading for his style alone.
Rating:
Summary: 15 Serial Killers
Review: Harold Jaffe's collection of "docufictions" delves into the lives of a Hall-of-Fame list of serial killers that includes Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and, yes, Henry Kissinger. Like other Jaffe works (False Positive, Eros Anti-Eros, Straight Razor) these stories encompass a range of innovative narrative styles - letters, dialogues, talk-show transcripts, interviews, as well as more traditional prose. While many have tried exploring the whys and wherefores of such ignominious minds before, none have done so like Jaffe. The 15 pieces here are as insightful as they are captivating. They lure one into the story and yank the emotional heartstrings; creating disgust one minute, a belly laugh the next. No punches are pulled with the subject matter and some of the graphic description is unsettling, indeed. But a strange compassion or tenderness shines through when least expected; there was some humanity to these serial killers after all, no matter how rarely exhibited. Throughout the book, Jaffe keeps the reader guessing; he's done extensive research into his subjects, so the line between fact and fiction is oftentimes deceptive. Also, the narratives of these notorious figures were (and still are) shaped in large part by the mass media, and, as usual, Jaffe's narratives reflect this as only he can. Highly recommended to those who aren't afraid to peek at the underbelly of our culture, or anyone looking for a highly charged reading experience.
Rating:
Summary: 15 Serial Killers
Review: Harold Jaffe's collection of "docufictions" delves into the lives of a Hall-of-Fame list of serial killers that includes Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and, yes, Henry Kissinger. Like other Jaffe works (False Positive, Eros Anti-Eros, Straight Razor) these stories encompass a range of innovative narrative styles - letters, dialogues, talk-show transcripts, interviews, as well as more traditional prose. While many have tried exploring the whys and wherefores of such ignominious minds before, none have done so like Jaffe. The 15 pieces here are as insightful as they are captivating. They lure one into the story and yank the emotional heartstrings; creating disgust one minute, a belly laugh the next. No punches are pulled with the subject matter and some of the graphic description is unsettling, indeed. But a strange compassion or tenderness shines through when least expected; there was some humanity to these serial killers after all, no matter how rarely exhibited. Throughout the book, Jaffe keeps the reader guessing; he's done extensive research into his subjects, so the line between fact and fiction is oftentimes deceptive. Also, the narratives of these notorious figures were (and still are) shaped in large part by the mass media, and, as usual, Jaffe's narratives reflect this as only he can. Highly recommended to those who aren't afraid to peek at the underbelly of our culture, or anyone looking for a highly charged reading experience.
Rating:
Summary: revolutionary dialogues
Review: How can a single volume of "docufictions" be graphically violent,
elegantly stylized, philosophically revolutionary and irrepressibly
funny all at once? Jaffe somehow brings it off. Given the subject matter, the graphic violence goes without speaking;
the stylization is in how the individual narratives (each "story"
belongs to a different serial killer) are modeled. Jaffe presents us
with monologues, "unsituated dialogues," letters, playlets, mock TV
talk shows, and various combinations of these modalities. The result
is not chaos but its opposite, a kind of fluidly elegant architecture
of form. Revolution is, it seems, the intent; a revolution of
consciousness which has aligned the serial murderer with the powerful
politician or media capitalist and demonstrated conclusively the
greater virtue of the serial murderer. As in False Positive, Straight
Razor, Sex for the Millennium and his other books, Jaffe is comical
in ways that can't easily be described--a combination of the
language, the uncannily accented rhythm and the wildly incongruous
details and images. The upshot is a virtuosic performance which is at the same time an
extraordinarily trenchant commentary on our post-Millennial culture.
--
Rating:
Summary: Brutal Applauds with LOUD SHRILLS
Review: I got my first taste of the exploratory and prolific author, Harold Jaffe, when I read his stories: "Latex Gloves" and "Straight Razor"from his STRAIGHT RAZOR collected works. These far from mainstream, revolting tales, introduce Jaffe with a distinct flavor that won't be misread. The tangy juices run through your veins long after you've devoured his words; embedding themselves inside you, leaving you with uncertainty mostly imparting within you an utter bewilderment for the unknown and unexplored. Jaffe derives so much satisfaction from his masochistic scribing of physical and emotional abuse? The gratifying pleasure, from humiliation and mistreatment, the tendency to subject his readers to unpleasant and trying sexual experiences through such poetic magnificence? From a sexual experience almost politically orgasmic? Who is Jaffe the author that has created an encounter that could make Madonna feel like a virgin being touched for the very first time? READ this extreme collection: 15 Serial Killers: Docufuictions by Harold Jaffe and find out!
Damn wicked, just freakin genius works by a master at the extreme. Brutally recommended! Come on, you know you want it....don't be afraid, --be VERY afraid that you just might enjoy it. *evil laughs* close your eyes and click the button --really nothing will explode. really... really.... you'll enjoy it --I love this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Repetition
Review: I picked this book up on finals week at the SDSU Bookstore because I've seen multiple copies sitting there, unsold, and kinda felt sorry for this faculty member and his brand of odd fiction. Now I want to take it back. I have read some of Jaffe's other books but this is exactly the same as the others. His talky stories all have the same voice and all have the same theme, with no character development, no emotion, no plot, no structure, and not even a hint of good writing development. It's repetition after repetition and grows old, very old, very fast. One may hope the author may try to expand his horizons and content in his next book.
| 
