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.
Rating:
Summary: Same old stuff Jaffe has been doing for years.
Review: If this book came out 10 or 15 years ago, it may have been interesting and different. Today, it's passe and overdone. Serial killers are yesterday's literary news, and the spare style, graphic violence, etc., was covered over and over in the small horror press in the 1990s. Plus, Jaffe's obsession with serial killers runs rampant is his past 3 or 4 books and 90% of this is exactly the same thing he's been writing the last decade or so. Been there, done that, don't waste your money on this one.
Rating: 
Summary: More Superlative Darkly Disturbing Work From a Modern Master
Review: If you are a fan of narratives that leave you feeling that strange stimulating combination of humor, unease and engagement (as I am), then you will not be disappointed with Jaffe's latest docufiction work that takes factual information about some of the most infamous killers ever known, from Charles Manson to Henry Kissinger, and treats it, at once giving intriguing insight into these dark and arguably brilliant criminal minds while exposing the exploitative, hypocritical media and culture that voraciously consumes and condemns them at the same time.Naturally, Jaffe presents all of this material in his usual innovative, unconventional fashion that keeps you thoughtful, amused and engaged until the end. This is a work for those who enjoy having their cultural assumptions interrogated while being thoroughly entertained--not for the unimaginative or feint of mind.
Rating:
Summary: Eyes Wide Open...
Review: In 15 SERIAL KILLERS, Harold Jaffe again exhibits his genius in literary technique and sociocultural investigation. The book comprises 15 "docufictions," each a pastiche of prose format inventions, focusing on fifteen figures, including Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Son of Sam, Dr. Kevorkian, the Night Stalker, Carlos the Jackal, Theodore Kaczynski, Charles Manson, and others. With searing intensity, Jaffe probes the psychodynamics of these figures, simultaneously deconstructing and evaluating the cult of attraction and media infatuation surrounding them. The result is a book of crucial relevance, in both aesthetics and subject matter. Jaffe's literary techniques force the reader to address and process a range of stimuli and make critical connections, in a fashion which mirrors the breadth of inputs--sensory, electronic, pedagogical, corporate, emotional-which an individual must navigate and integrate in the highly-charged world of 2003 and beyond. On a textual level, each of Jaffe's docufictions contains a matrix of interview/interrogatory/ script/editorial/"live" narration/parody/ reconstruction/ dialog/mise-en-scene/biblical-folkloric refrain/commentary-blended and sectioned into an acute and profound biographical sketch. In the texts, Jaffe reveals the prejudice and incompetence of the police as they attempt to corral the necrophilic and cannibalistic Jeffrey Dahmer; the sadomasochism and dental sensitivity of John Wayne Gacy; the childhood imprisonment, rabbit-love, and obesity theories of David Berkowitz; the asexuality of Dr. Kevorkian (including his repulsion from "the original coochie-coochie" Charo) and his aspirations of cadaver experimentation; the tremendous apathy and merely-average endowment of Richard Ramirez; the lovesickness, false medical casts, and gourmandize of Ted Bundy; the M2F fantasizing and corporate funding of Theodore Kaczynski; the passive-aggressive anti-Semitism and Freudian examination of Carlos the Jackal; the boyhood rapes, theatrics, and Johnny-Cochran admiration of Charles Manson... and much more. Reading 15 SERIAL KILLERS is enlightening on many levels. The dimensions of Jaffe's prose style expose the limitations and artificial "realism" of much commercial and "workshop" fiction. Jaffe's skill at unveiling the psycho-sexual motivations of his subjects is captivating and instructive. 15 SERIAL KILLERS is in fact a guide to dissecting and processing hidden assumptions and prejudices woven into the media-driven terrain, the nexus of sound byte, spin, lurid detail, prejudice, presumption, juxtaposition, and agenda which constitutes today's reported "reality." Read this book-eyes wide open...
Rating:
Summary: Eyes Wide Open...
Review: In 15 SERIAL KILLERS, Harold Jaffe again exhibits his genius in literary technique and sociocultural investigation. The book comprises 15 "docufictions," each a pastiche of prose format inventions, focusing on fifteen figures, including Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Son of Sam, Dr. Kevorkian, the Night Stalker, Carlos the Jackal, Theodore Kaczynski, Charles Manson, and others. With searing intensity, Jaffe probes the psychodynamics of these figures, simultaneously deconstructing and evaluating the cult of attraction and media infatuation surrounding them. The result is a book of crucial relevance, in both aesthetics and subject matter. Jaffe's literary techniques force the reader to address and process a range of stimuli and make critical connections, in a fashion which mirrors the breadth of inputs--sensory, electronic, pedagogical, corporate, emotional-which an individual must navigate and integrate in the highly-charged world of 2003 and beyond. On a textual level, each of Jaffe's docufictions contains a matrix of interview/interrogatory/ script/editorial/"live" narration/parody/ reconstruction/ dialog/mise-en-scene/biblical-folkloric refrain/commentary-blended and sectioned into an acute and profound biographical sketch. In the texts, Jaffe reveals the prejudice and incompetence of the police as they attempt to corral the necrophilic and cannibalistic Jeffrey Dahmer; the sadomasochism and dental sensitivity of John Wayne Gacy; the childhood imprisonment, rabbit-love, and obesity theories of David Berkowitz; the asexuality of Dr. Kevorkian (including his repulsion from "the original coochie-coochie" Charo) and his aspirations of cadaver experimentation; the tremendous apathy and merely-average endowment of Richard Ramirez; the lovesickness, false medical casts, and gourmandize of Ted Bundy; the M2F fantasizing and corporate funding of Theodore Kaczynski; the passive-aggressive anti-Semitism and Freudian examination of Carlos the Jackal; the boyhood rapes, theatrics, and Johnny-Cochran admiration of Charles Manson... and much more. Reading 15 SERIAL KILLERS is enlightening on many levels. The dimensions of Jaffe's prose style expose the limitations and artificial "realism" of much commercial and "workshop" fiction. Jaffe's skill at unveiling the psycho-sexual motivations of his subjects is captivating and instructive. 15 SERIAL KILLERS is in fact a guide to dissecting and processing hidden assumptions and prejudices woven into the media-driven terrain, the nexus of sound byte, spin, lurid detail, prejudice, presumption, juxtaposition, and agenda which constitutes today's reported "reality." Read this book-eyes wide open...
Rating:
Summary: Will the true serial killer please stand up?
Review: In 15 Serial Killers, Jaffe turns our eyes again to the lurid margins of the culture. His intention: not simply to revivify an assorted gallery of killers' crimes in all their gory, sensational detail, but to examine how we condemn and consume these acts in the same breath. As the news media and Hollywood have long understood, murder is sexy, attention-grabbing (consider the other texts grouped with this one: Dead and Buried: A Shocking Account of Rape, Torture and Murder on the California Coast; Evidence of Murder: A Twisted Killer's Trail of Violence; No, Daddy, Don't: A Father's Murderous Act of Revenge. They offer a virtual smorgasbord of sensationalism). We consume murder and murderers like we consume porn - though with less trepidation or shame. We are, Jaffe suggests, like the parasitic Helga-Lee Uberroth in "Wuornos," who befriends the notorious killer Aileen Wuornos only to revel in the spectacle of her life, profit from it. We watch CNN intently, feel the easy moral outrage, the readily available mixture of disgust and arousal, feel virtuous, then move on, never probing deeper. A deeper probe is Jaffe's intent (see also his Sex for the Millennium). This is not to condone the murders themselves. To have some small compassion for the killer, some interest in understanding him or her, is not to sanction the act or to negate compassion for the victim(s). And compassion, beneath the stylization and dark humor, is what Jaffe is ultimately after (and is arguably what Jaffe is after in all of his works). The suffering caused by those on the margins should not close us off to the suffering felt by them, he suggests - nor should the media's packaging of the acts. (Much of the meat of this collection of docufictions, of course, has been culled from actual news accounts. Yes, Jaffe treats this material, but the prevailing attitudes toward serial killers and the prevailing modes of representing them are already in place; Jaffe merely seeks to expose how we are asked to think about them. In that sense, this collection continues the work of False Positive, which even more directly works to expose the media's distortion of news and history). 15 Serial Killers is worth reading precisely because it avoids further sensationalizing the serial killer, precisely because it humanizes or re-humanizes those dehumanized by infotainment and easy public regard. By following Jaffe to these extremes, perhaps we come closer to Bataille's freedom - to thought and feeling less prone to mediation, contamination, colonization.
Rating:
Summary: *---------*
Review: In 15 Serial Killers, Jaffe turns our eyes again to the lurid margins of the culture. His intention: not simply to revivify an assorted gallery of killers' crimes in all their gory, sensational detail, but to examine how we condemn and consume these acts in the same breath. As the news media and Hollywood have long understood, murder is sexy, attention-grabbing (consider the other texts grouped with this one: Dead and Buried: A Shocking Account of Rape, Torture and Murder on the California Coast; Evidence of Murder: A Twisted Killer's Trail of Violence; No, Daddy, Don't: A Father's Murderous Act of Revenge. They offer a virtual smorgasbord of sensationalism). We consume murder and murderers like we consume porn - though with less trepidation or shame. We are, Jaffe suggests, like the parasitic Helga-Lee Uberroth in "Wuornos," who befriends the notorious killer Aileen Wuornos only to revel in the spectacle of her life, profit from it. We watch CNN intently, feel the easy moral outrage, the readily available mixture of disgust and arousal, feel virtuous, then move on, never probing deeper. A deeper probe is Jaffe's intent (see also his Sex for the Millennium). This is not to condone the murders themselves. To have some small compassion for the killer, some interest in understanding him or her, is not to sanction the act or to negate compassion for the victim(s). And compassion, beneath the stylization and dark humor, is what Jaffe is ultimately after (and is arguably what Jaffe is after in all of his works). The suffering caused by those on the margins should not close us off to the suffering felt by them, he suggests - nor should the media's packaging of the acts. (Much of the meat of this collection of docufictions, of course, has been culled from actual news accounts. Yes, Jaffe treats this material, but the prevailing attitudes toward serial killers and the prevailing modes of representing them are already in place; Jaffe merely seeks to expose how we are asked to think about them. In that sense, this collection continues the work of False Positive, which even more directly works to expose the media's distortion of news and history). 15 Serial Killers is worth reading precisely because it avoids further sensationalizing the serial killer, precisely because it humanizes or re-humanizes those dehumanized by infotainment and easy public regard. By following Jaffe to these extremes, perhaps we come closer to Bataille's freedom - to thought and feeling less prone to mediation, contamination, colonization.
Rating:
Summary: This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen
Review: Jaffe has been called a literary pioneeer, and rightly. His tendency is to treat the seemingly most intractable material and somehow transform it into a potent message on behalf of those segments of society that other people--including writers--do not--or choose not to--see. Here, Jaffe's subject is serial killers, and though the names are familiar--Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, Son of Sam, the Unabomber--the treatment is like nothing you can imagine. The best way I can put it is that when you finish this amazing volume it is as though your eyes have been sewn wide open.
Rating:
Summary: re-problematized sex and violence
Review: Jaffe's latest volume offers more of his trademark narrative fireworks and, as has been cited in other reviews here, mixes up our understandings of abberation in our ugly culture. One tactic that I found particularly compelling is the way in which Jaffe forces us to recognize that each of the protagonists in his gallery of ghouls, has in fact been born of our culture, has had a childhood (Manson was raped in his), has a father and mother, has a life that led to pathological violence. Although there are lots of violent depictions of sex and murder, none of it is erotic. Rather, Jaffe means to decontextualize his subjects as products of our deparaved culture and systems, as media products we regularly consume in standardized ways. He means to be confrontational, to make the reader squirm, as he describes Ted Bundy's crimes from Bundy's point-of view. Even as Jaffe implicates the status quo for its ravenous appetite for sordid crime details, he also shows us he understands those appetites. Manson is not redeemed, but he is humanized, given a past. More importantly, Jaffe draws out the attraction that people have for these characters by showing how their disregard for law, for morality, for normal humanity has, in fact, made them into representatives of total freedom, liberated passions--this is part of what makes them such compelling stories. There's no denying that we are attentive to serial killers' stories and crimes, but many would like to forego the exploration of what it is about these figures that compels our attention. Many would rather stay anesthetized, watch Silence of the Lambs or Helter Skelter again and keep our cancers in their usual locktite containers. Insulated in the usual sensationalized moralism and pandering, the phenomenon of serial killing is as polite and non-confrontational as a plate of gouda and apple slices. Jaffe makes sure we can still smell the rotting corpseswhile we consider the crimes, that the smell infects out minds for a good long time. Readers seeking escapism or more the usual lurid packaging of abberant violence and sex should steer clear of this book, but those looking for intellectual provocation and elegant contemporary fiction will find much to admire and ponder in these docufictions. Employing his usual battery of formal experiments, Jaffe dares to align our cultural monsters with the depravity of our national corporate-government-media culture. In doing so, he reveals a state of social decay that goes well beyond what any of us would like to believe or admit. His wisdom and insights, however, demand that we consider his arguments. This is political art of the first order.
Rating:
Summary: See you in Disneyland!
Review: Radically innovative writer Harold Jaffe pulls out all the stops with his newest collection of prophetic meta-fictions. Just you keep on flipping that remote. Jaffe is now in control of your television set with his chilling array of hyper-real killers and virtual predators. At once both menacing and comic, 15 Serial Killers sinks its razor-sharp fangs into the media manipulated society that both condems and consumes serial killers as an entertainment "product." Jaffe challenges even the hippest of readers to think for themselves about our crumbling sit-com society. Read this book and let Jaffe grab you by the scruff of the neck and take a close, hard look at it.
|
