The Sociopath

Rating:
Summary: Chilling!
Review: Donald Eckman was dying. Nothing would stop that, but he planned to take quite a few low-lifes with him! Eckman was a man who had it all planned out and was cold-blooded enough to do it.

Roosevelt Holmes had raped, maimed, and/or killed over thirty-four women, girls, and boys. Yet his sentence was only two years. He was released early, for good behavior, thinking he could easily continue if he was just a bit more careful. However, he was not the only one counting down his days and hours until freedom.

Nancy Rausch kept tabs on Holmes. She planned her revenge carefully, all the way down to how she would castrate him. Chris would help her get him. Chris also had planned revenge...on the world! Chris had set up a way to rid the Earth of much of its scum. A bit of IVG-5 introduced into the Minneapolis waterworks would work for starts.

***** Never have I read a book like this one. We have all heard of Hannibal. He was labeled (correctly, I might add) a Cannibal. Now meet those with the label Sociopath. Many with this mental disorder get rich because they do things "normal" people would not dare. Others end up poor, due to the same reason, or in prison. But some are like this!

Here is a book that will keep you up late into the night reading! You will never look at the strangers around you the same way again! Highly recommended reading! *****

Rating:
Summary: Primitive, but interesting
Review: In some ways this novel is a throwback to the glory days of pulp fiction, say the 1930s when paperback novels were a dime apiece. They were typically written in a couple of months in a hard-boiled ersatz James M. Cain style with an ordinary joe as the protagonist. They served well as escapist fare for flophouse waitresses and guys selling apples on street corners. Even the slightly smudgy-looking typeset in this book--as though the characters had been Xeroxed from Xeroxed copies--suggests an earlier time.

In other ways this is like something out of the late 1970s just before AIDS and the backlash against explicit sexuality in the mass culture. And in still another way this is like the violent movies that came from directors like Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone when Hollywood could no longer sell explicit sex and had to switch to violence.

The narrative is written in an unpretentious style full of simple, declarative sentences with flashes of oratory such as one might hear from jail house lawyers or barroom philosophers. Adams has a good ear for low- to middle-class dialogue of the kind that characterized not just the fiction of James M. Cain, but of the now forgotten James T. Farrell and a host of naturalistic imitators. In a way this work can be seen as a violent offshoot of the proletarian novel of the thirties that came out of the naturalistic tradition from the 19th century.

The story itself reads like it was pieced together in a hurry. Adams apparently wrote the book during the first five months of 1980. The title, along with a quote from "PERSONALITY AND BEHAVIOR Copyright 1963 by Jesse E. Gordon, PhD" which serves as a preface, seems tacked on, like an afterthought in an attempt to give the story an intellectual focus. More appropriate, to my mind, would have been choice words from a tome on nihilism, since that is the sort of cynical philosophy spouted by some of Adams's characters.

One of those characters, a black man named Roosevelt Holmes, is, however, not a nihilist, but is an attempt at fulfilling the promise of the book's title. He is a violent psychopathic rapist and murderer, but his personality is not really worked out. He has none of the disarming charm and duplicity attributed to sociopaths in the literature. He is rather a kind of animalistic sexual predator blind to anything other than is own bloody gratification.

There are other problems. Adams begins in the first person and then switches to the third, and alternates back and forth. While I am not a narrative purest, I think the entire novel could have been written in the third person without losing anything. Worse yet, because he apparently wanted to keep a silly and unnecessary plot twist hidden until the story is three-quarters over, his first person narrator suddenly becomes somebody else. I had the sense that this twist occurred to Adams at about the three-quarter mark. At any rate, after the twist is revealed, one sees a change in self-referentials from the first person narrator. I'm being vague because I don't want to give away anything important. I will say that it wasn't foreshadowed, and seems to come completely out of the blue, and again for no reason. The "love affair" is quickly disposed of, which is just as well since it had nothing to do with the plot anyway.

To illustrate, let's compare the "Chris" from page 12 with the suddenly different "Chris" of page 211.

Page 12: "From now on I could kill any man I wanted, I could overpower any woman I desired, and no one on this earth could do anything about it."

Page 211: "I tried to cry out but already I was suffused in a glow of sudden pleasure and without even being conscious of it my arms reached around him instinctively and hungrily and I gasped in the lovely gush of wetness and warmth."

Another problem is that the characters think an awful lot alike. The nihilistic speeches from narrator Chris could easily be exchanged with those of lung cancer victim Donald Eckman. The two women in the story are very similar in that they both take on masculine styles in speech and behavior, and are little concerned with the usual preoccupations of women. In a strange way, all of the characters seem like sociopaths. I'm not sure that is what Adams had in mind.

And then there are the loose ends. For example, never explained is how Chris got the government to release the men from prison. It's not even clear why. The idea that Vincent Savanna would have the ability to round up all the low-lifes in Minnesota and that there was any point to Chris's preaching to them, seems utterly silly. Also never explained is how and why a US Army soldier on patrol in Korea would be wearing a moneybelt with "one hundred and twenty-three thousand in Won, Yen, script, and American greenbacks" or what that has to do with anything. And resting on the shakiest of rationales is the trailer to be buried in Cohen's yard as some kind of fallout-shelter tomb (although I kind of like the zaniness of it).

There is indeed throughout the novel a kind of random association of people, ideas, and places as though quickly thrown together, perhaps because that is what the author wanted to write about that day. Yet there is a story and a plot--discovered, it would appear in medias res--that leads us from dissatisfaction to chaos.

In spite of the faults, there is one thing that Adams does well, and that is write the kind of prose that is easy to read while creating a kind of netherworld of unsavory characters that may fascinate some readers.

Rating:
Summary: Primitive, but interesting
Review: In some ways this novel is a throwback to the glory days of pulp fiction, say the 1930s when paperback novels were a dime apiece. They were typically written in a couple of months in a hard-boiled ersatz James M. Cain style with an ordinary joe as the protagonist. They served well as escapist fare for flophouse waitresses and guys selling apples on street corners. Even the slightly smudgy-looking typeset in this book--as though the characters had been Xeroxed from Xeroxed copies--suggests an earlier time.

In other ways this is like something out of the late 1970s just before AIDS and the backlash against explicit sexuality in the mass culture. And in still another way this is like the violent movies that came from directors like Quentin Tarantino and Oliver Stone when Hollywood could no longer sell explicit sex and had to switch to violence.

The narrative is written in an unpretentious style full of simple, declarative sentences with flashes of oratory such as one might hear from jail house lawyers or barroom philosophers. Adams has a good ear for low- to middle-class dialogue of the kind that characterized not just the fiction of James M. Cain, but of the now forgotten James T. Farrell and a host of naturalistic imitators. In a way this work can be seen as a violent offshoot of the proletarian novel of the thirties that came out of the naturalistic tradition from the 19th century.

The story itself reads like it was pieced together in a hurry. Adams apparently wrote the book during the first five months of 1980. The title, along with a quote from "PERSONALITY AND BEHAVIOR Copyright 1963 by Jesse E. Gordon, PhD" which serves as a preface, seems tacked on, like an afterthought in an attempt to give the story an intellectual focus. More appropriate, to my mind, would have been choice words from a tome on nihilism, since that is the sort of cynical philosophy spouted by some of Adams's characters.

One of those characters, a black man named Roosevelt Holmes, is, however, not a nihilist, but is an attempt at fulfilling the promise of the book's title. He is a violent psychopathic rapist and murderer, but his personality is not really worked out. He has none of the disarming charm and duplicity attributed to sociopaths in the literature. He is rather a kind of animalistic sexual predator blind to anything other than is own bloody gratification.

There are other problems. Adams begins in the first person and then switches to the third, and alternates back and forth. While I am not a narrative purest, I think the entire novel could have been written in the third person without losing anything. Worse yet, because he apparently wanted to keep a silly and unnecessary plot twist hidden until the story is three-quarters over, his first person narrator suddenly becomes somebody else. I had the sense that this twist occurred to Adams at about the three-quarter mark. At any rate, after the twist is revealed, one sees a change in self-referentials from the first person narrator. I'm being vague because I don't want to give away anything important. I will say that it wasn't foreshadowed, and seems to come completely out of the blue, and again for no reason. The "love affair" is quickly disposed of, which is just as well since it had nothing to do with the plot anyway.

To illustrate, let's compare the "Chris" from page 12 with the suddenly different "Chris" of page 211.

Page 12: "From now on I could kill any man I wanted, I could overpower any woman I desired, and no one on this earth could do anything about it."

Page 211: "I tried to cry out but already I was suffused in a glow of sudden pleasure and without even being conscious of it my arms reached around him instinctively and hungrily and I gasped in the lovely gush of wetness and warmth."

Another problem is that the characters think an awful lot alike. The nihilistic speeches from narrator Chris could easily be exchanged with those of lung cancer victim Donald Eckman. The two women in the story are very similar in that they both take on masculine styles in speech and behavior, and are little concerned with the usual preoccupations of women. In a strange way, all of the characters seem like sociopaths. I'm not sure that is what Adams had in mind.

And then there are the loose ends. For example, never explained is how Chris got the government to release the men from prison. It's not even clear why. The idea that Vincent Savanna would have the ability to round up all the low-lifes in Minnesota and that there was any point to Chris's preaching to them, seems utterly silly. Also never explained is how and why a US Army soldier on patrol in Korea would be wearing a moneybelt with "one hundred and twenty-three thousand in Won, Yen, script, and American greenbacks" or what that has to do with anything. And resting on the shakiest of rationales is the trailer to be buried in Cohen's yard as some kind of fallout-shelter tomb (although I kind of like the zaniness of it).

There is indeed throughout the novel a kind of random association of people, ideas, and places as though quickly thrown together, perhaps because that is what the author wanted to write about that day. Yet there is a story and a plot--discovered, it would appear in medias res--that leads us from dissatisfaction to chaos.

In spite of the faults, there is one thing that Adams does well, and that is write the kind of prose that is easy to read while creating a kind of netherworld of unsavory characters that may fascinate some readers.

Rating:
Summary: When the world just doesn't fit you any more...
Review: There doesn't seem to be much information available about this book, so I am actually quite glad that I picked it up on a recommendation from a friend.

The Sociopath is a work of fiction, most of it told in the first person by our protagonist. It does, however, cleverly skip around in both time-frame and point-of-view; but don't let that stop you from picking it up. What sounds like it could be annoying or hard to follow is in reality a very smooth, very fast read. I finished this book in one day (a beach-read) and I am definitely *not* a speed-reader.

The book did not contain enough gore for me, being a fan of such Gorror writers as Edward Lee and Jack Ketchum and Jeff Long; but it makes up for its lack of blood in the chillingly distracted narrative of some very unsocial behavior.

I absolutely refuse to give anything away here, but there *is* a sociopath in the book, and our first person narrator has a very big surprise for you in store.

Although I loved the book and recommend it highly, I felt that the ending did fall short of the entire story's potential, especially with one character kind of left stranded out on his limb tidying up another character's loose threads. I felt he should have been visited in more depth before leaving him dry like Mr. Adams did. It was almost as if Adams could have kept going for another 50 pages, there was surely enough left to uncover, and enough blood to bathe in one last time.

This book is an exciting look into the sociopathic mind, with startling twists and very deeply fathomed characterizations. If you like sick, and you like twisted, grab a copy of The Sociopath to fill in those gaping wounds in your fleshy bookcase. Enjoy!