The Help, and My Help

Opposum Actors Guild announces come back, plans cameos in next five adaptations of novels about race relations set in pre-Civil Rights era.

Growing up in Atlanta, I never had a black maid. But I did have a black martial arts instructor, and two Korean ones. Does that count? I haven’t thought much about them in the past decade, until trying to force myself through The Help, and realizing how much it reminds me of those dark days in secondary school where I learned to yawn at “socially-important fiction.” Indeed, I expect this book will be torturing high school seniors for generations of AP Literature.

There seems something patently disingenuous about contemporary books exploring race as if it were a taboo subject. Race is important, and it should be written about, but why does it always get the same treatment in Southern Lit–with the rare exception of trail blazers like Toni, Alice, Harper, and the like? I’d like to see a novel that goes against the grain, just like my last few posts. Race in my own life was a matter of national news–O.J. Simpson, the race riots, Rodney King. In fact, California seemed to have more issues in the early 1990s than greater-metro Atlanta.

A childhood in Atlanta could be pretty multi-racial, to the point that the pre-Civil Rights era might as well have been the dark ages. At least in my perception, racism hovered somewhere near the bottom of the exploded concepts pool  along with the use of leaches and the burning of witches. Maybe I do owe part of this to my martial arts teacher. Twice a week for about five years,  sometimes three times a week during the summers, my ass was under his command. Imagine a Catholic school teacher with a black belt and an attitude. It was physical and mental punishment with forms, grappling, foam shields, and lots of shouting. A compliment from this man was worth missing the first half of X-Files on a Friday night, because of all the work it took to earn one. When I think about my own work ethic, self-discipline, low tolerance for nonsense, and Stoicism, I’ve got to admit that part of it came from my years-long interactions with him. If nothing else, he helped teach me the futility of whining or thinking, “I can’t do it.”

At fifteen, I became an assistant instructor. I had a special patch sewn on my uniform and everything. I got to boss around other adolescents. My martial arts master watched me lead groups of five, six kids, and sometimes an entire class of fifteen. Once, I got the special privilege of “closing down the dojo,” which meant locking the doors and carrying the keys to him at the pool hall next door. In retrospect, I’m not sure why I felt so stupidly pleased with myself. (Any retard can lock a door.) But the point is that I did.

My martial arts teacher might have been providing a “service,” I guess, that ultimately my parents were paying for. But the only “yes, sir” or “no, sir” involved in this relationship came from yours truly. (And it came often.) There wasn’t much ambiguity as to who was in charge. If anyone in our class screwed up, we all paid through extra leg-numbing drills. Disclaimer: I’m not saying I’m the only person who had an experience like this. I’m also not going to write a 400-page book on it and submit to 50 agents. I’m more the type to write a 400-page book about talking opossums. I would definitely send that out.

Different times, of course. But let’s face it. The vast majority of Southern novels about race jump straight back to the 1960s. Why? Even novels set in the contemporary South spend half their time looking fondly (?) upon that era. I know nostalgia, history, and regret are supposed to be major themes in Southern Lit. Believe it or not, the 1980s and 1990s was a generation ago now–uncharted territory to get wistful about.

All these years, I’ve convinced myself this isn’t a “Southern” experience because it doesn’t fit within the cookie-cutter bookends of the Great Southern bookshelf. But lately I reflect on these moments and ask, how can it not fit? Of course, I could continue narrating my multi-racial upbringing and multi-ethnic martial arts teachers as a counter-narrative to the trends we see so often in popular Southern Lit. The truth is, I feel as irritated and awkward writing about it as I do when reading those novels. I guess I could write my own tome about race relations in literature, but it would read more like Erasure–which is short, funny, and to the point.

Faulk You II: Southern Archetypes versus Stereotypes

My last post on Southern fiction apparently stirred the hive. Let’s stir it some more. As a friend from Charleston said, “It was entertaining but probably didn’t earn you many friends.” Maybe not, but I’ve always had a sore spot when it comes to exploitation of Southern stereotypes. Even as an MFA, I’d nearly vomit whenever some “Yankee” tried to write about cotton fields or the Klan. I read and wrote some real crap in grad school round one, and it takes a lot to make one vomit. In any case, my last entry earned a couple of comments that inspired more thought about the South, the New South, and novels. Exhibit A:

Hi, I havent read your books and you haven’t read mine.  I promise to refrain from critiquing your books before I’ve read them, if you’ll do the same for mine.  Some people employ stereotypes, and others seek to use them to explode them.  Good luck with your work.   The “Southern” bookshelf is large and there is plenty of room for all.   Thanks!  Mark

Yes, that’s Mark Childress. Beneath this sensible proposal lies the premise that I’m not “justified” to express a reaction about the first chapter of a novel–arguably the most important part. The second part of this comment neglects to note that, while the “Southern” bookshelf is large, mediocre books are taking up a lot of the space. Since that comment, I’ve miraculously finished the rest of Georgia Bottoms and also Crazy in Alabama. Although I’m not fond of authors who try to police public discussion about their books, I’m less fond of books that purport to explode stereotypes–Southern or otherwise–but wind up inflating them further.

Like a number of popular Southern novels, Georgia Bottoms hits almost all of the key “S” themes by the end of the first page: church, ice tea on a front porch, excessive heat, Baptists. It picks up the rest of the themes by the end of the second or third chapter: shelling peas, the Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, racists, George Wallace, and words like “Ya’ll” and “Paw.” Oh, and it turns out that one character has spawned an illegitimate child from an interracial relationship. Childress has carefully plotted into his book every stale, overdone concept. I don’t see any use of these commonplaces to forward satire or serious social commentary. Even worse, I didn’t laugh. Not once. Well, that’s not completely true. But I probably laughed for the wrong reasons.

If that weren’t enough, we get one of the shallowest treatments of racism I’ve seen in a Southern novel. As one character observes, “If uppity Rosa Parks hadn’t sat down on that bus in Montgomery, things might have stayed as they were when Little Mama was young: gasoline was nineteen cents a gallon, a white woman had privileges, you could have a colored girl do your housework for nothing. Little Mama didn’t invent that way of living, but she sure as hell preferred it to the way things were now.” Is this character supposed to be a Dixie-fried racist? It sounds more like a bad impersonation of one.

About halfway through the book, one of Georgia’s boy toys gets pulled over because a deputy suspects he’s a “Ku Klucker.” I was wondering when the Klan reference would show up.

My biggest problem with the novel lies with the main character–a heap of stereotypes, unlikable, mundane. She’s supposed to be unlikable, but she’s not even interesting. Nothing about her explodes anything, except my attention span. For some reason, 9/11 takes place in the middle of this novel and ruins a luncheon that Georgia’s planned. Instead of doing anything truly selfish or despicable, Georgia wishes “everyone would just go home so she could cry.” Then she thinks, “Anyway they were strangers, they were Yankees, they should be none of her concern.” This isn’t compelling, even in its lack of empathy. Georgia is not someone you love to hate, just a forgettable wannabe socialite. My second biggest problem lies in the trite use of events like 9/11 and the foreshadowing of Katrina to score points for political awareness. At least that’s how it comes off.

It’s one thing to encounter these staples in a book. (After all, I liked Bastard Out of Carolina.) The KKK are still usable as villains or even jokes, but it’s not as easy as it looks. With Childress, and a number of other authors in the Southern canon, it’s hard to see the tropes as genuinely inspired–more like they’re getting stuffed in at every fold, so that the book appeals to “Southern” readers and promotes an image of the auteur as bona fide Deep South. Even if a KKK false alarm is supposed to be humorous, I’m not laughing. Frankly, reading this book was like being strapped to a chair in a room with Jeff Foxworthy and Joe Dirt for two hours. Not fun.

That’s my opinion; I’m expressing it without malice. (Irritation is different from malice). I am, however, expressing it with the mindset that someone needs to say something about the exploitation of Southern-ness without the butter and sugar.

Moving on to meditation: I continue to reflect on what it means to be Southern. My street cred has been called into question throughout my adult years, in amusing ways, mainly because of my lack of an accent. I’m not exactly proud of my lack of accent, and I never worked to get rid of any accent like news anchors do. I just never developed one. Blame it on TV. Once, someone even asked “Are you a Southern writer?” I said, “I guess.” She asked, “You were born in the South, right?” When I said, “Yeah,” she said something like, “Whew, good. But work on your accent.”

Make no mistake. I’m Southern, and I know all the tropes. I grew up just outside Atlanta, GA. I learned Coca-Cola, Margaret Mitchell, Martin Luther King. I also learned Chick-Fil-A, Ted Turner, General Sherman. And I learned Morehouse, Michael Jordan, The Varsity. I can go on. In middle school I visited MLK’s boyhood home and his church. All of eighth grade history was dedicated to Georgia, and our teacher mapped out nearly every Civil War Battle in detail on the chalkboard over the course of a month. I even got teased about possible relations to James Earl Ray. (I promise, he’s not in the family lineage book.) I’ve taught MLK and Malcolm X in my American Lit classes. I met Truett Cathy in the fifth grade, and I also panned for gold in Dahlonega.

Sometimes I wonder why I haven’t jammed all of that into some short stories. If I cared only about becoming the next Kathryn Stockett, I might. Instead, I try to imagine that an audience of mine–however small–has seen a lot of this before and so they want something new, or at least a creative use of the old standbys. I’m less disturbed by recent news about the lawsuit against Stockett than I am bored with media hype of books proclaimed to be the next To Kill a Mocking Bird. I’m not merely speaking as an author here, but an avid reader who’s taken graduate coursework in the Southern novel and who’s been reading “Southern” books since I could spell. Having actually read and enjoyed Gone with the Wind, All the King’s Men, Confessions of Nat Turner, Huck Finn, Deliverance, Beloved, Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, Bastard Out of Carolina, Half-Mammals of Dixie, Serena, and several Faulkner novels, I guess I’m just that hard to impress and hoping I’m not alone. And just in case anyone’s forgotten the terror that was Jeff Foxworthy: http://youtu.be/H7qZIRtbFJ8

My Brief Life as a Crime Reporter

A box filled with copies of my new novel will arrive in the next few hours. So I’m moved to reflect a little on the year I spent writing full-time for a now-defunct newsweekly called Snitch that started in Louisville and pretty much ended there–with the exception of a franchise in Columbia, SC. South Carolina was the perfect place for something like Snitch. It was an odd, gruff, fly by night operation that didn’t care much what other people thought. I started out writing their “Zip Code Crime Watch.” I drove around to all of the local agencies and read through incident reports for anything chilling, intriguing, or funny. We concentrated on funny. You’d be surprised at the stupid things criminals do. Or maybe you wouldn’t be surprised, especially if you’ve ever lived in South Carolina.

We were pro law enforcement. If crime’s your bread & butter, you don’t have much of a choice. Most of the time that didn’t pose a problem. After a couple of months, the cops loved us. My editor, Jerry Adams, had the good sense to place Snitch newsstands in all the law enforcement offices. So cops and deputies read and laughed at the crime-watch pages and delighted when one of their busts got into the paper.

Here’s an example of how much they loved us: My editor sent me to the State Fair to tag along with the Richland Co. Sheriff’s department for a night. At first, the Sgt. I shadowed thought I worked for The State. For about 20 minutes he regarded me with a polite but reserved manner. When he found out I actually worked for Snitch, a happy glow came over his face and he said, “Oh, man. You write for them? I love that paper.” He opened up, talking about his family’s history in law enforcement. He’d inherited the line of work from his great-great grandfather, one of the first U.S. marshals. I wound up interviewing him for a story but the paper closed down before I could finish it. Anyway, the main point is that many of the local cops liked us a little better than the main show in town.

I still remember my first story, about crime scene cleanup crews. I interviewed a few of the local companies and wrote a grisly blood & guts piece that made the editors feel a little queasy. That was the first hint I might wind up writing a crime thriller.

Over the weeks and months, I got to know the local law enforcement relatively well. When Richland opened a new forensics lab, I got a free tour. I also went out to the Columbia PD horse farm, where the mounted patrol kept their four-legged friends. (They did not offer me the chance to ride one, however.) I got to cruise around in a patrol car for a couple of nights, and I also got to attend court once or twice. The only downside to all of this was that, since we were  weekly paper, there was no point in really learning to use a police radio like the big boys. I dug into cold cases and almost managed a trip out to Pee Wee Gaskins’ old place, where last I checked law enforcement was still cooperating with USC to search for remains with sonar.

In the end, my dream job wasn’t meant to be. Snitch helped support poverty-stricken Me through my first year of grad school and gave me the basic tools to write gripping fiction. Then they shut down, for a range of reasons that certainly had nothing to do with my performance as a journalist. I learned several valuable lessons from this job: First, don’t call on your ex-girlfriend to pick your sorry arse up from jail, especially if you were serving time for domestic assault. (That’s why she’s your x-gf now, chief.) Second: Alcohol and baseball bats do not mix well, especially at pool parties. Third: Do not fall asleep in your car in the middle of Two Notch Rd past midnight with a joint smoking on the dashboard and an open beer in your lap. Fourth: it’s best not to jump out of a moving vehicle, even if that vehicle is being tailed by a Crown Vic with flashing lights.

Faulk you: Toward A More Resonant Southern Lit?

A recent article about Southern fiction’s had me thinking for a few weeks now. In story South, Chris Tusa complains about the lack of originality in Southern Lit. Similar ideas crossed my mind more than once in ’09, as I drove from one end of the South to another plugging my book at stores and festivals. All right, fine. So the farthest west I traveled was Nashville, but you get the point. The size of my audience ranged from a dozen people to a hundred or more. My crowds easily tripled when I sat on panels with established Southern writers who wrote about well-trod topics like the Civil War, the KKK, Barbecue, Jesus, Debutantes, and Pick-up Trucks. The more of those you could mix into a book, the bigger your crowd. That’s what I learned. The South I watched everyone celebrate at the book festivals was a different world from the South I’d grown up in, and definitely different from the one I wrote about as a crime reporter.

There’s a whole slew of neglected themes that great Uncle Faulkner and Aunt Flannery wrote about: fratricide, incest, suicide, necrophilia, sociopathy, nihilism. Few of the popular novelists I read about use these killer ideas. Part of me is glad, because I want them all to myself. And so I threw a number of these into my latest novel, Unknown Female. And I didn’t just read dead Southern authors to come up with it all. I read an altogether different landscape when crafting the small, suspicious town of Stonewall. South Carolina has loads of bizarre, unsolved murders. They have one of the meanest and most prolific serial killers in Donald “Pee Wee” Gaskins. The crime rates in some areas are high, and SC has a competitive rank for domestic homicide. Charleston might be a great place to visit now, but in the 1970s it was filled with strip clubs and unsavory types. In fact, back in the 1800s when Charleston kept suffering hurricanes and fires (and malaria), John C. Calhoun proclaimed that God was punishing them for their wickedness.

So my South is different–not a pleasant, nostalgic place. My favorite characters don’t go to Folly Beach and watch Mango Sunsets, unless a body was washed ashore there. Genre explains some of this, but not all of it. When I read Pee Wee’s memoir Final Truth, which is still a best-seller in Florence, I thought, “This is it.” More than any Southern novel I’ve read, a mass-murdering psychopath manages to capture the attitude, landscape, tone, and culture of the place I lived in for ten years. It’s like Sailor Ripley from David Lynch’s Wild at Heart wrote a confessional.

Only one true story can embody the South more than Gaskins, and that’s “The I-95 couple,” as they’re sometimes called. Two good-looking teens were shot to death on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere SC in 1976, ironically the same year as the nation’s bicentennial. A trucker found them the next morning. An investigation ensued, but the local law never found a killer, or even the victims’ names. The local coroner grew almost obsessed with the case over thirty years. I interviewed her twice, and she has a number of conspiracy theories–from drugs to the mafia. In 2007, she convinced a forensic anthropologist to unearth the caskets for possible DNA testing. Surprisingly, they managed to pull skin samples. The anthropologist told me that some of the woman’s bones still had a soapy residue of flesh. And yet, it looks like nothing’s come of the effort. No DNA matches in any system. The local newspaper still runs a story about the couple every year, as if it’s a kind of offering to appease their ghosts.

Oddly enough, the editor I worked for at Snitch was the first reporter to cover the investigation. He covered it from day one and even attended the funeral. It was reading his stories on microfilm that I found out they’d been kept in glass coffins for a year before their burial–so possible family could ID the bodies.

I drove to the town two or three times over the course of two years, for the sole purpose of reading through the case files–a cardboard box stuffed with transcripts and photographs. The local law interviewed one man several times who might’ve killed the couple in a psychotic rage and then blocked it from his memory. They received mysterious queries from people in Oklahoma who told them about “a girl who saw something she shouldn’t have seen” and was snuck out of town for her own safety. They even interviewed Ottis Toole and Henry Lee, who confessed to the killings at one point.

As I worked on the story, my editor grew nostalgic. He even drove an hour to the little church and laid flowers on the couple’s graves. I drove there myself a few years ago and wound up having a chat with the groundskeeper. It was 2007, just a few days after they’d been exhumed. The dirt was freshly tilled. The area was quiet for miles, just cornfields and houses. Sometimes an abandoned shack, or a small cemetery with rust-colored tombstones. A playground not far from the dead.

That’s always been my strongest image of the South. Two people without names, dead, never claimed by their own relatives, lying in donated caskets outside the Sheriff’s own church. It resonates. But I’m obviously a strange person.

So my first reaction to the idea of breaking stereotypes is this: Do “Southern” readers really want their stereotypes broken? I don’t see much that says so. The Southern Indie bestsellers list lands in my inbox every week, and I see books that either play to the status quo or challenge it in the safest possible ways. Every now and then a big-time Southern author pats a rising star on the head for breaking conventions. But right now I’m reading all the praise for Georgia Bottoms and trying to get past the first six pages. Hot, non-air-conditioned church. Sweating pastor. Sassy, middle-aged woman who serves as our main character. I’ve got no desire to rage against the literary establishment like Anis Shivani. (Although I don’t necessarily disagree with his main idea.) Nonetheless I read about the new books every year and think, Ehhh? Do we want to pay $25 for this? No, we don’t.

I’m not sure self-proclaimed Southern writers of today have all that much in common with the giants who birthed the genre. Faulkner and O’Connor didn’t do cute, clever, jokey, or nostalgic. They wrote biting critiques of their culture, and their humor stung. Their characters don”t struggle heroically through divorce, joblessness, family illness, or depression. They don’t wind up okay in the end. They usually wind up dead, in fact, or ruined. I don’t think we need to over-worry about breaking the conventions of Southern fiction. But I think we can think more creatively about what those conventions truly are in the first place.

Dark Horror Round-up

Spring’s the perfect time to watch dark thrillers and horror, so long as they’re tasteful. The past couple of weeks I’ve watched Dead Girl, The Jacket, Suspect Zero, Some Folks Call it A Sling Blade, and Ted Bundy. Don’t worry, it’s research. Um, for a book. I have to admit, the thriller genre has kept my interest in films more than the books I’ve slogged through. Most crime thriller novels don’t seem to understand imagery.

The undisputed champion of my latest thriller-horror binge is Antichrist, recommended for serious adults only. I’m jumping into this fray late, but I’ve been reading about Lars von Trier and the response to Antichrist and find myself more disgusted by the media’s portrayal of the film than anything that happens to Willem Dafoe or Charlotte Gainsbourg. When newspapers and mags run headlines like “Features Sex, Guilt, and Genital Mutilation,” that shows what they think the film is about. They’ve also said it’s unlike any other film; sure, it’s great. But it’s in a clear heritage of artsy psychological horror going back to Bergman’s The Hour of the Wolf and Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.

Here’s what the film is actually about: To someone dealing with emotional-psychological trauma, the world can look sinister. As a film buff and avid reader, I often don’t like films that play “scary” as if it were a game or mindless entertainment. Darkness is part of the human experience. Informed audiences who pay for a dark film want a director who conveys an actual sense of dread, hauntedness, and awe. Not just shock. The scenes that “feature genital mutilation” are supposed to be uncomfortable to watch. Being human is often uncomfortable and wretched. The film is also about love and egotism. Dafoe’s character underestimates his wife’s level of depression, thinking he knows how to “cure” her better than her therapist. The characters are deep and complex, and the acting conveys that. The landscape is also dead on. I’ll never listen to acorns falling on a roof the same way.

I’m thinking about Antichrist in contrast to a movie like Ted Bundy, which was a disappointing film on many levels and deserves–if anything does–the criticism leveled at Von Triers. Both films explore gynocide, except only one of them is smart enough to even use that word. The Bundy film dramatizes horrific crimes but it always keeps the audience in a safe, voyeuristic space where they can “partake” of the violence without any consequences. I kept waiting to be taken inside the killer’s mind, like in Tom Tykwer’s adaptation of Perfume. I should’ve known better. In Ray’s humble opinion, the peek-at-violence and the glimpse of an insane mind is far more damaging and more likely to produce little Bundy-wannabes. Of course, I’m not saying all dark movies need grotesque violence. There’s lots of ways to make audiences feel uncomfortable. The problem is that films like Bundy, etc, don’t make their audiences unsettled at all, only entertained.

But none of that makes for an interesting headline. So media outlets reduced a brilliant, artistic film down to two scenes that, combined, comprise less than 10 seconds of the entire film. Von Trier caught a lot of flack for refusing to explain why he made the film. In Ray’s humble opinion, a creator shouldn’t have to explain why. The reason is in the work itself. If critics need a blunt justification, something’s wrong. Either the director screwed up, or the critics are misguided.

Revamping Website, Suspect Zero, Lenore

I’ve found a marvelous new writer and influence: http://www.spookyland.com/. Kudos to Roman Dirge for grabbing the domain name “spooky land” before anyone else dreamed it up.

Take a look at my web renovations over at the main website www.brianrayfiction.com. It’s been a busy week: traveling, proofing (one last time), and reading. Of course, there’s always room for cinema. I highly recommend the film “Suspect Zero,” which beat Dexter to the idea of a serial killer going after other killers by about two years. Remember Harvey Dent From “Dark Knight”? That’s our hero.

And Ben Kingsley beats the hell out of any psycho vigilante I’ve ever seen or read or heard about. He even gives Anthony Hopkins a run for his coins:

And now a little reading, then bed.

A Medley: New Book, Home Decorating Installment One

Lovely apartment, designed by Gideon Ponte for "American Psycho."

So much to blog about. I’m burning through crime thrillers this week, including Dexter is Delicious. It’s nice to see a strong return after Dexter by Design, which I thought ended on a bit of a whimper. I’ve been thinking about Lindsay’s latest through the lens of Mark Twitchell’s trial–the creepy amateur filmmaker who impersonated Dexter Morgan on Facebook and bragged about killing to a girl-friend. Twitchell also stored luminol in his garage. Actually, let’s be clear: his parents’ garage, where he also made dorky costumes and dabbled in special effects. His murder apparently dovetails with his work on a Dexter-esque screenplay called “Macabre House of Cards.”

Daring to speak for all writers, I’d like to point out what offends us even more than actual killing: the dim-witted. Just like the teen who strangled his brother in the name of cinematic sociopathy, Twitchell misunderstands the point of dark fiction. For example, Lindsay’s hero spends much of Delicious pining for quality time with his newborn daughter and shopping for educational games at toy stores. Midway through the novel, Dexter even stops to survey the glut of play weapons and asks, “If we teach our children violence, can we really be surprised when now and again one of them learns?” With that pithy observation, Dexter opts for a boardgame called “Head of the Class,” only to arrive home in anxious disapproval as his sinister brother plays violent Wii games with Astor and Cody. Time and again, it becomes clear that Dexter hates what he does and tries hard to change. Except when skunks get away with murder, and in this novel Dexter delivers justice to a rich kid whose gotten one free pass too many.

Different genres of killers exist. The Twitchells of the world fall into the same category as Dexter’s foes in this book–aspiring vampires who practice cannibalism on willing and unwilling participants. They run around with filed teeth–handiwork of a cosmetic dentist–and manage an exclusive club called Fang. These people are not driven or compelled to kill. They’ve simply watched too much Twilight. I doubt that Twitchell felt compelled to kill, either. He was compelled to brag about it, though, from lack of the necessary imagination and work ethic to carry through his creative projects.

Now, on to home decorating tips. (No, this is satire, to any potential Twitchells out there.) Someone beat me to the punch on this one. Honestly, I like the idea of meat chairs. But I don’t think so. Anyway, this guide provides a nice supplement. So, I present readers with clips from serial killers’ apartments.

Lesson # 1: avoid stuffed road kill. Otherwise, other serial killers will make fun of you. In fact, people should avoid the Ed Gein approach altogether. Who wants skulls and bones in their kitchen? They smell, and they also make guests uncomfortable.

Lesson # 2: You’ll also want to avoid disturbing collages. Not only do they smack of cliche, but they tend to give away one’s devious plans. The police or FBI will most likely track down your digs, so don’t leave them clues. Don’t even try to leave them tantalizing red herrings. This usually backfires. In this demonstration, you’ll want to jump to 5:37. Notice the book pages dangling from the ceiling, extremely inefficient and grotesquely tasteless. Imagine how difficult all of that mess would make moving around on a daily basis. Personally, I wouldn’t be able to focus:

Lesson # 3: Minimalism. Serial killers could do worse than emulate Patrick Bateman’s posh but spare dwellings, designed by Gideon Ponte. Observe the Charles Rennie Mackintosh “Hill House Chair” (1903), the Mies van der Rohe’s “Barcelona Chairs” (1929), and the Mies’ “Barcelona Stools” (1929). I implore everyone to indulge their senses in the Robert Longo prints in the background of the scene below. Bateman might possess an inner monster, but he exhibits stunning taste. The art reflects this killer’s clean, orderly mind. Remember that plastic sheeting helps dispose of evidence, but it also keeps this lovely abode spotless:

Here’s the same apartment, without all the blood: