by Neil Gaiman
An articulate, faithful, and noble man, yet an ethnic outsider, Othello is driven to madness, murder, and suicide by the ingenious manipulation of his scheming underling Iago, who causes him to doubt his angelic wife for no real reason beyond his own love for evil. In Iago, we are granted a truly chilling vision of the modern psychopath, from the chameleonic charm of Ted Bundy to the manipulative nihilism of Charles Manson. An egomaniac who thrives on chaos and lies, Iago is a devil in human shape, a worm that gnaws the very fibers of human community and makes faithful men into murderers. When all is revealed, a blood-simple Othello seeks to assure himself that Iago is indeed a horned, cloven-hoofed demon: “I look down towards his feet; but that’s a fable,” for such would be a comfort, next to the awful truth that such monsters walk among us.
In The Prince (1532), Machiavelli sought to define the ideal statesman, and without an iota of irony sketched a profile of the controlled sociopath one would need to be to successfully wield the tools of political and economic power. In the ability to seem like one of us while always standing ready to employ deceit and brutality, Machiavelli defined the rare but justifiably terrifying controlled psychopath as the ideal statesman, and anticipated the modern strategy for recruiting CEOs by several centuries.
The Marquis de Sade scandalized Europe with his exhaustive catalogs of decadent perversity, while the Gothic tradition elevated obsession and madness into a fevered romantic ideal. Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) created the mold for Gothic villainy with his cruel patriarch, Manfred, while the haunted Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights(1847) owed much of his tormented persona to Emily Brontë’s brilliant but doomed brother, Branwell.
The Gothic tradition embraced a particular, highly stylized depiction of madness and evil, culminating in an archetype that plagues literature and drama to this day. The diabolical genius, the archfiend whose madness grants almost supernatural powers to concoct elaborate schemes of torture and punishment. The Monk (1796) was a sensation and the prototype for sadistic supervillains down through the centuries, from Professor Moriarty to Dr. No and Jigsaw.
But nobody could penetrate the essence of madness like a real madman. Guy de Maupassant wrote three hundred short stories, only a handful of which were horrific, but one dark masterpiece remains a milestone in the artistic understanding of insanity. In “The Horla,” the narrator foolishly invites a bodiless spirit into his home, only to find the alien consciousness has invaded his brain and is gradually assuming control over the narrator’s body and mind. Maupassant could speak with authority on the subject of madness, for he was suffering from advanced syphilis when he wrote it in 1887, and later died in a madhouse.
But for true psychological depth, the Gothic had to come to America, and Edgar Allan Poe. An alcoholic tortured by romantic obsession with a dead cousin and overwrought with bitterness at his failed career, Poe observed sanity down the wrong end of the telescope and virtually invented, alongside the detective story, the treasured concept of the unreliable narrator. His epic “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) traps its witness in the crumbling house of an inbred family racked by hereditary madness, and like so many of Poe’s oversensitive heroes, nearly goes crazy himself.
Michel Foucault has insisted that each era manifests its own native brand of madness. The insanity of an era usually goes undiagnosed until it passes into history, unless an individual arises to dramatically epitomize the secret malaise.
Victorian England kept a tight lid on its seething subconscious desires, but in 1888, London birthed a figure to shame its most lurid penny dreadfuls. When Jack the Ripper murdered a handful of prostitutes in Whitechapel, his savage exploits dragged the suppressed demimonde and the hypocrisy of London’s male citizens into the spotlight. His dastardly taunting persona resonated so deeply because it balanced refinement and wanton cruelty so perfectly that he could be the voice and hand of London itself, and his successful escape left the world with a mystery more tantalizing than any fiction. Ripper theories are only outdone by the JFK assassination industry for sheer volume and paranoid invention, and writers from Robert Bloch and Harlan Ellison to Alan Moore and Alan M. Clark continue to see in the enigma of the unsolved murders an evil far beyond mere madness, and an archetype too compelling to be contained by history.
Even as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung diagnosed the banal neuroses and psychoses of early twentieth-century life, a more naturalistic approach in fiction uncovered the dismal, often pathetic symptoms of the modern maniac. While horror pulps continued to offer cardboard craziness, the hard-boiled crime story hijacked horror’s integral engines to show the true nature of psychosis.
The psychological crime story was born long before, with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866), which relentlessly documents an unstable student’s guilty path to madness. Raskolnikov senselessly murders a pawnbroker to prove to himself that he is a Napoleonic figure, a man of destiny who can “step over blood.” But the murder becomes a linchpin of obsession and furious remorse that shakes him to bits. This is the lot of the sane man, the gulf between the “sane” and the insane that one must step over to become a cold-blooded killer.
Insanity as a motive for murder was explored by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and lesser noir pioneers, but in the hard-bitten underworld, only the idle rich can afford to go insane. The next generation of hard-boiled writers turned the mystery inside out, leaving us alone with the killer as he plies his trade. Jim Thompson’s protagonists are all too aware of the evil of their actions, and endlessly skilled at passing for what square society considers normal. The deputy in The Killer Inside Me (1952) gives a tour of his intricate web of murder and deceit and revels in posing as a hapless dimwit. Likewise, the sheriff in Pop. 1280(filmed brilliantly as Coup de Torchon) pretends to ineffectual stupidity while pushing the citizens of his town around like disposable pawns.
Neither raving maniacs nor diabolical geniuses, Thompson’s sociopathic killers are blessed with an absence of conscience, but cursed by the compulsion for dominance and pain. Without studying Freud or Sade, streetwise Thompson understood that banal, awful childhood abuse twisted young minds to make others’ pain into the closest thing to pleasure that a sociopath could feel.
Another generation on, and crime fiction has circled around to become everything that horror fiction should be, with Freudian monsters worthy of Hollywood. Andrew Vachss’s unstoppable Burke series obsessively details the cycle of abuse and the many species of “street freaks” spawned by it, including the hollow shell of an antihero detective who narrates the books.
Beginning with The Black Dahlia (1987), James Ellroy explored the sickness of misogyny and the human hunger for violence by infecting and testing his characters to destruction. As the gruesome murder of Elizabeth Short leads two detectives into a wilderness of contagious perversity and madness, they seem to be hunting not just a killer but Patient Zero in an epidemic of psychopathology. At the heart of this and each of his succeeding LA novels (The Big Nowhere, LA Confidential, White Jazz), a subhuman pervert is the primary killer, but the real monster driving everyone insane is the warped and false glamour of the American Dream. That Ellroy has used his career to examine and understand the unsolved murder of his own mother is a strong argument for the power, or at least the pathology, of using fiction to make sense of the inexplicable.
Meanwhile, in the horror genre, the madman became increasingly a fantastical figure, with little basis in real psychology. In the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert W. Chambers, and other popular early twentieth-century fantasists, madness remains an excess of passion rather than an absence of regret. In John Collier’s morbidly flippant yarns, homicide is only a poignant misunderstanding away, while in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos canon and Chambers’s odd horror shorts, the fragile curtain of sanity can be ripped down just by perusing a book––the Necronomicon and The King in Yellow, respectively.
In an increasingly hacky search for cheap thrills, horror sacrificed truth in depicting mental i
llness to play to the fears of the “sane” audience: that an insane person walks among them and may kill them or that they could go insane themselves. Insanity could be but one of the excuses for a villain’s otherwise inexplicable behavior. A creature entirely enslaved to the demands of a mechanized plot, the dangerous lunatic could be counted on to escape from the insane asylum right on schedule to make a creaky plot deliver at least the semblance of surprises.
For those who wanted their psychology dumbed down even more, Freud in four colors was on offer in Detective Comics. Every character in the Batman universe is a grotesque scarred by trauma, driven to don a sub-Freudian costume and take part in an endless carnival of crime. Even for Batman, obsession and psychosis are the only superpowers one needs. Despite, or because of, the increasingly dark tone wrought by modern writers like Frank Miller and Grant Morrison, Batman continues to exert a far stronger psychological appeal than the sunny Superman, but the key to the Batman universe is that most iconic of all psychopaths, the Joker.
Borrowing freely from Conrad Veidt’s manic grimace in The Man Who Laughs (1928), the Joker is a nihilistic thief and murderer whose irritating asides and throwaway gags mask an awareness of the joke too big to get laughs in Gotham City: that they are puppets in a madhouse play. Growing ever more dangerous and absurd with the decades, the Joker is the only one to transcend his disposable origin story (more about this in Film, below), because he’s not a madman, but madness itself.
Popular culture seemed determined to keep lying to itself about the criminally insane forever, until a shrewd young prodigy weaned on a Lovecraft correspondence course in weird lit set the record straight. Robert Bloch famously based Psycho (1959) on the incredibly sordid case of Edward Gein, a shy backwoods Oedipus who channeled his freakish mother-love into a spree of grave robbery, murder, cannibalism, and ghoulish craft projects.
By making Norman a meek, retiring nobody and keeping the tormented mother obsession in the closet, Bloch cut through decades of bullshit to show us a true homicidal psychopath––racked with guilt and torment, yet driven to destroy women before they can destroy him.
Indeed, few writers of light entertainment strove to understand madness, so much as to bear false witness against it in the service of art. Insanity is an occupational hazard for any professional who thinks too much, and creative genius, in particular, seems to carry the seeds of unreason within itself. The works of Nikolai Gogol, Louis Wain, Syd Barrett, and Bob Meek are all the more fascinating for the glimpses they provide of the mind in the throes of a breakdown. Perhaps the unbelievable quality of madness in so much of both early and modern literature owes as much to the willful obscuring of the territory of madness by artists who fear that going there could mean staying there, as it does to the expediency of genre hackwork.
Too, the psycho can be the frustrated author’s revenge on an indifferent world, or even the hidden destructive face disguised behind the passive mask of the creator. It is hardly ironic that the most successful writer in the history of the language returns so regularly to the theme of the raging nihilist trapped inside harmless, outwardly ordinary people who are, as often as not, writers.
In Rage (1977), Roadwork (1981), and Apt Pupil (1982), Stephen King gives vent to a shockingly caustic disillusionment and disgust with modern society that must tap into a vein of fury as American (or simply human) as apple pie. One of King’s most forceful pet themes is the writer with the split personality. Writers constantly engage in a host of mental games that parallel, if not actively mimic, the routines of paranoid schizophrenia. Writers tour other people’s lives, as King himself puts it, and the active listening to the inner voices others suppress can yield destructive mysteries as much as inspiration.
In The Dark Half and Secret Garden, Secret Window, the writer-protagonist is dogged by a ruthless killer who turns out to be a suppressed alter ego, while in The Shining (as much a horror novel about writer’s block as ghosts), Jack Torrance becomes an empty vessel that fills with the urge to destroy instead of create.
Where many writers fade into irrelevance as their personal work becomes entangled with the rarefied life of the professional author, King’s writers’ nightmares sell in the tens of millions because the notion of a secret self capable of wiping out one’s enemies must seem more like a fantasy than a horror in some deep recess of the collective modern mind, an undiagnosed mental illness with which we are all a little bit infected.
While public fascination with the criminal mind continued to drive fictional killers to more fabulous extremes, the true crime genre offered ghastly thrills no fiction could get away with, and almost made morbid curiosity respectable. Truman Capote’s examination of a horrific home invasion murder, In Cold Blood (1966), created a new market that bypassed the comforts of fiction to reveal the much more raw stuff lurking behind it. The Clutter family’s drifter killers were merely desperate, disaffected losers, but the sensation caused by his penetrating examination of their motives gave birth to the true crime genre.
Lurid criminal accounts have been popular for as long as printing presses existed (Daniel Defoe is supposed to have written a pamphlet about Sawney Bean), but modern true crime fused the suspense techniques of thrillers with the fascinating minutiae of police procedure and the unflinching examination of grotesque details forbidden in popular art. Despite lurid covers plastered with body-count scores, the killers’ sad biographies delve deeper than fiction into the motivations and methods of previously obscure or forgotten murderers like H. H. Holmes, Albert Fish, and Marcel Petiot. But no psycho has benefited more from his negative press coverage than Charlie Manson.
When the sensational Tate-LaBianca murders wrecked the Aquarian age and confirmed the establishment’s worst nightmares about hippies, LA prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi wrote an even more extraordinary account, Helter Skelter. The runaway best-seller wallowed in the squalid insanity of Spahn Ranch but failed to dispel the mystique of the Family’s cunning ringmaster, Charles Manson, who remains a media-made celebrity in captivity.
In the 1990s, FBI profilers John Douglas and Robert Ressler each scored a series of true crime best-sellers with deep explorations of the psyches of serial killers in prison. Though these sensational but educational books raised public awareness and inspired literary and television franchises about the pursuit and prosecution of serial killers, novelists like James Patterson and Patricia Cornwell dwarfed their success with serial killers as wildly unrealistic as their forensic detail was rigorously spot-on. In their sleek way, the new murder thrillers revived the Agatha Christie gambit of improbably elaborate murders as a parlor game.
The defining masterpiece of the serial killer boom is Red Dragon (1984). Juxtaposed against the pathetic, compulsive killer Francis Dolarhyde, Hannibal Lecter emerges as the archetypal human wolf––the diabolical madman as archfiend, combining Moriarty’s elaborate cunning and refinement with an utterly bestial capacity for violence. As described in the books, Lecter is readily recognizable as a monster, with deep red eyes and extra digits. A natural predator, Lecter charms and disarms his potential meals, but he only eats the rude. In both Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs(1990), he exerts an almost supernatural menace despite his draconian captivity. A demon in a bottle, he cooperates with Will Graham and Clarice Starling to catch less evolved killers for his own amusement. When he finally wins his freedom, the apocalyptic bloodshed is a prelude to an even more disturbing silence. Lecter has gone to ground, but with him out in the world, somehow a natural balance has been restored. The modern jungle needs its wolves, its cullers of rude sheep.
Quite predictably, Hannibal Lecter became a mainstream sensation when the film version of Silence of the Lambs became an Oscar-winning box office success. A deft blend of conservative police procedural and subversive slasher horror epic, it foisted the cannibalistic serial killer into the limelight as an edgy media darling, a far more toothsome alternative than his dismally introverted real-life cousin, Jeffrey Dahmer. But in the process, he be
came domesticated. When Billy Crystal was wheeled onstage at the Oscars in Lecter’s restraints and muzzle, the taming of the predator seemed complete. Harris must’ve agreed, for Hannibal (1996) went off the rails in its mad charge to reassert Lecter’s untamable savagery. When he captures and seduces Clarice Starling, he effectively “cures” the traumatic childhood experience that drove her to become an FBI agent, and frees her to become a human wolf like himself.
Whatever wild hair drove him to take such a caustic tack, the movie bailed on Harris’s subversive climax, and Harris himself sold Lecter down the river in Hannibal Rising (2006), a disappointing origin story that explored the trauma that set Lecter on the path to cannibalism––in effect defusing all the inscrutable appeal of the character. The premise that nature creates such monsters to thin the human herd, and the notion that the drive to do good is no less a clinical deviation from the norm still linger, but as an orphaned subtext.
But long before Hannibal, the truly frightening question of natural-born killers in our midst was taken up in a very different form. William March’s 1954 novel The Bad Seed gave us little Rhoda Penmark, an adorable moppet who coldly kills anyone who thwarts her will. A “serious” work that eschewed genre sensationalism or easy psychological answers, the book spawned a Broadway play and film that posited the genuinely disturbing question of evil with no motive, no traumatic mainspring or genetic deformity to explain its aberrant evil. The horrible, lingering theme of The Bad Seed is that no matter how much we love and socialize our children, some of the sheep will inevitably become wolves.
Iain Banks escalated March’s muted approach with his devastating debut novel, The Wasp Factory(1984), in which young Frank describes with little or no remorse his elaborate rituals of animal cruelty and the murders of several childhood playmates. While signs of hereditary instability abound––Frank is haunted by his older brother, an escapee from an asylum––Frank affords us a chilling glimpse of the inner terrain of the born psychopath: a dreary, cold void in which only the bright colors and brittle sounds of agony and doom register.
