Dr Jacques COULARDEAU

SERIAL CANNIBAL ACADEMICS

https://jacquescoulardeau.medium.com/serial-cannibal-academics-abffd37f6ee2

Holly Gibney is on the cover by name but not by face. Since she is in the continuation of Bill Hodges and Finders Keepers, she should be white. But she comes after the Holly Gibney of The Outsider adapted for television, and here she is a Black woman with a very expansive hairdo, with dozens of long braids. But don‘t worry. In this book, Holly Gibney encounters none of the problems a Black woman would encounter as an investigator having to deal with white people without a gun, a uniform, and a badge. The way she gets the confidence of white people, including in this case the serial killers, at least one, does not show any racial bias on their side. And from the second serial killer, she only gets reluctance to speak and even cold hostility and distance keeping. Concerning Barbara Robinson who is a Black woman, this second serial killer, Emily Harris serves her a cup of tea of the worst possible type she can devise.

That’s what I think is the main shortcoming of this book: the lack of graphic descriptions of what these serial killers do to their victims, how they cut them up, probably alive for a while, and concerning the consciousness of the racial bias Black people are the victims of, it is only rather generic and more a social trait of the US society than frustration and resentment on the side, I mean the inner and mental side, of the Black characters, Jerome and Barbara, and a few others like Ellen Craslow, and since we are in the George Floyd period, I am surprised that there is no allusion to him, and only an allusion to a fictitious local and unknown Black victim in a similar situation and yet not very graphic about it.

No one could imagine two celebrated - locally and (inter)nationally - academics could be serial killers, and not for the pleasure of killing, but to provide them with the necessary human molecule and flesh to expand their old age, hence to survive more than the laws of nature would entitle them to. Old (dot)age is like Jane Calamity coming down from the mountain on a fiery horse, one of the four you know.

Éditions La Dondaine, Medium.com, 2023

# posted by Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU @ 4:52 AM