During this long lockdown I'm reading John Sandford's "Prey" series of novels, whose protagonist Minneapolis-based criminal detective Lucas Davenport goes after the perpetrators of rather gruesome crimes. "Rather gruesome" is an understatement, and so when I read the author's introduction to "Mind Prey", quoted below, I had a resurgence of my ever-increasing desire to secede from the human race.
Sometime after I finished Mind Prey, I was invited to give a talk about crime-fiction writing at a medical examiners' convention. As part of the deal, I got to sit in on the convention, which I did for a while. I left after an FBI presentation on serial killers because, quite frankly, my stomach wasn't strong enough to look at the pictures.
I covered the crash of an L1011 airliner in the Everglades, with arms, legs and heads lying all over the place, saw perhaps a hundred or so surgeries in doing some occasional medical writing, including double amputations on accident victims and debridement of burn victims, and saw any number of shot people waiting for ambulances, without much problem. But what insane criminals do to people, especially women — that I can't look at, or write. When I deal with such subjects in the Prey series, I promise you that the violence is toned down.
Far down.
