Word: serials
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...sculptures staff the theater: Theda Bara sits in the box office; Mae West sells you candy; Mickey Rooney is the usher; a sarcophagus creaks open to reveal the late James Dean. In the theater auditorium, its walls a splurge of film-trivia graffiti, you can watch a silent-movie serial or just gawk at the delirious decor...
...compare, however, with Jonathan Kellerman's The Butcher's Theater (Bantam; 627 pages; $19.95), a sprawling yet spellbinding plunge into Jerusalem's ethnic, religious and social cauldron. Kellerman, a clinical psychologist whose previous books have featured a psychologist as detective, turns here to tracking the emotional evolution of a serial killer and the creation of a multiethnic police team to catch him before his savagery destroys the fragile equilibrium among Jews, Arabs and Christians. The mawkishly melodramatic finale is Kellerman's only miscalculation in a vivid, fascinating tale...
...contradictory. Rock videos suggest orgiastic sex. Public health officials counsel "safe sex." Prudence -- and morality -- would recommend no sex to children, who have no clear idea of what sex is anyway. Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue conduct seminars on such subjects as lesbian nuns, exotic drugs, transsexual surgery, serial murders. Television pours into the imaginations of children a bizarre version of reality. But TV has a certain authority in loco parentis. It is there when the kids come home...
...this time around, he doesn't get to do much else. Evan Kim, as Inspector Harry's Chinese-American partner, is allowed to display some martial-arts machismo. Liam Neeson, playing a director of low-budget slasher movies who is high on Harry's list of suspects in a serial-killer case, corners the market in upscale cynicism. James Carrey gets to go fruitfully bananas as a rock star on the mainline to an early grave. And David Hunt, as a maniac film fancier named Harlan, provides the jolt of menace. Hunt can even terrify a film critic before slicing...
Authorities still have no promising leads to the identity of the serial murderer who attacked mostly prostitutes and runaways. Their disappearances were sometimes not reported until years after they were killed. The lag time has frustrated investigators, who have spent $13 million in pursuit of the slayer since the first victim was found along the Green River near Seattle in 1982. Police cling to one consoling fact: they have found no victims murdered after 1984. Since such killers rarely quit, police hope this one is either dead or already in prison...