Word: murdered
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...rogue undone by his few fleeting moments of trust and devotion. A former male prostitute, he becomes infatuated with a blond boy as pretty and venal as he used to be. Cutler knows that he is being used. Even so, his sexual itch drives him to theft, fraud and murder. Each crime makes him more subject to blackmail. The tale moves toward its climax with a mounting sense of catastrophe, but who will destroy whom, and how, remains uncertain until the final pages. Hansen writes as ably as anyone in the genre about the consequences of lust and yearning...
...Soviet Union's systematic starvation of the rebellious Ukraine in 1932-33 (10 million by Stalin's count) and Mao's catastrophic Great Leap Forward into prolonged famine in 1957-62 (at least 27 million). Uganda and Kampuchea have produced more recent evidence that Hitler's policy of mass murder as an instrument of statecraft was not unique. Yet the Final Solution remains the archetype of man's bestiality to man, and there are compelling reasons for this to be so. The villain: Hitler still seems the embodiment of melodramatic evil, a spellbinder sent from hell or central casting...
...daughter Sybill, a middle-aged spinster who sees a hypnotist to have her subconscious unclogged. Her mother inconveniently expires before Sybill can begin an inquiry. To her siblings, that is just as well. They, and the cousins and in-laws who gather for the funeral, regard talk of ancient murder as tiresome and hysterical. This is an unfocused bunch, and they are not in the mood for Faulknerian horror...
...does the author seem to be. A bulldozer arrives, and the old well is excavated. A long-buried murder that comes to light cuts to the heart of the family, or should. The discovery provokes another death. Yet the survivors behave more or less as they would have done if nothing had occurred. This is not satire, with the family members portrayed as herd animals who go on grazing as a lion drags down one of them. The author is sharp but not cruel. She does not tell her story in order to solve a murder (although solve...
...crazy, but crazy in the way some people are at cocktail parties; she is able to find a plausible argument for almost any evil that governments commit, and she has turned Lemon into her philosophical clone. "Lemon presents the justification for pure selfishness," says Shawn, "even for sadistic murder. The question is raised: To what extent have we already accepted these justifications? I intentionally set out to leave the audience frustrated and unsatisfied...