'Deviant Ways' Is Aptly Named

Have you seen that episode of "The Simpsons" in which Homer builds Bart an evil clown bed? And Bart ends up sitting at the breakfast table in the morning, rocking back and forth in a fetal position, muttering, "Can't sleep. Clown will eat me," with an empty, haunted look in his eye?

Put a copy of Chris Mooney's "Deviant Ways" on the bedstand instead of an evil clown bed, and replace Bart with me.

I'm serious. This is a really freaky book, and I'm not one to be cowed by normal horror stories. I love reading Lovecraft and Somtow, and Stephen King's earlier horror, among others. But there are a few different kinds of horror, and I'm not sure that I enjoy all of them.

The first kind is regular horror stories -- monster movies of one kind or another. The creature is simple: an inscrutable, kinda dumb killing machine, who may be a creature from the black lagoon, Frankenstein's monster, or a Jason or Freddie ex-human monster. These aren't really that scary; the movies and books play on your fight-or-flight reactions, and the monster is very two-dimensional: "Monster kill people. We kill monster."

There are mythical horror stories, like the vampire trend, and the Blair Witch legend. These recall older days of humanity, when we thought we understood less about the world, and Evil (note the capital "E") was embodied in physical creatures who roamed the land, the darkness to our perceived light.

S.P. Somtow writes books like this, and they're a bit scarier, tapping into all sorts of Jungian archetypes and our suspicions that, despite the bright neon lights and our two-dollar non-fat grande cappuccinos, there are things with wet teeth in the shadows.

There are also stories of the Other -- alien beings whose very existence is inimical to our own. Lovecraft was the master of these, creating a world where the spark of humanity was continually on the edge of being swallowed by a universe of ancient hatred and horror, where not only are we powerless, but we are ignorant of even the fundamental rules of reality -- the angles are wrong. This stuff gets freaky real late at night, when your thoughts are disjointed and the burning in your eyes makes the world less real than it is in the daylight.

"Deviant Ways" belongs to the fourth kind of horror: the monster within. This kind of horror encompasses the most frightening aspects of the others: the incomprehensible blood lust of Jason, the mythic-yet-real possibilities of the vampire and the cold, omnipotent intelligence of Lovecraft's Elders.

Psychological and intimate, serial killers are the perfect monsters, because they are us -- they look like us, know us and walk among us. From all outside perspectives, they are undetectable -- and yet they are the most frightening of creatures, because they have taken the humanity that belongs to all of us and made it into something evil. And alone among the others, they are real.

Mooney's novel is reminiscent of that most familiar serial-killer story, "The Silence of the Lambs," in that it uses the mind of a serial killer to capture another. In this case, the protagonist is an ex-FBI agent, Jack Casey (Clarice?). Casey is an ex-serial killer profiler for the bureau who is haunted by demons of his past.

The fascinating part of the book is the exploration not only of the serial killer mind, but the demonstration that the profilers, the people who find and protect the rest of us from the monsters, are effective because they have a flavor of the madness themselves. They, too, descend into the raw pits of human emotion and potential for hatred and power in order to understand, and thus capture, the killers. The line between comprehension of these emotions and drives, and drowning in them, is thin.

Casey is joined by another ex-profiler whose descent into the darkness has gone further than his own, but both are indelibly marked by their experiences. Casey's rage against the acts of the criminals whom he has chased echoes the killers' own madness, and his emotional manipulation and torture by the man whom he chases in "Deviant Ways" dredges up the scars of the last time a serial killer took notice of him.

The man he is chasing begins by killing entire families at a time, tying them up and torturing them in front of the father or mother, then bombing the house to clear the evidence. He is brilliant, a meticulous planner, and the book slowly begins to feel like an asylum where the inmates have complete power. The investigators are always one step behind him, as he carefully orchestrates a campaign of blood.

Casey's quest to find this latest serial killer brings him close to the bomber, who intimately oozes into his psyche. He uses Casey's own painfully savaged memories to manipulate and, ultimately, try to destroy him. Casey is plagued by the dead bodies that he has seen, and the guilt of deaths unstopped. His journey is one toward redemption, but his character is so deeply twisted that redemption seems impossible.

The book is excellently driven, and obviously compelling. Yet I'm giving it only a rating of three, because frankly, I'm not sure that I like being scared this much. It's not the existence of serial killers that freaks me out; it's the well-detailed portrait of a mind stripped to its raw constituents and twisted that frightens me -- the possibilities within humanity, and the worlds of darkness inside. Mooney tells them well.

Deviant Ways by Chris Mooney ISBN: 0671040596 Pocket Books, 2000

About the author

Chris Mooney lives north of Boston, where he is currently at work on his second novel.