The Author Reviews *The Murderess* For Electric Literature
August 2nd, 2010 | Published in Electric Literature, Publishingz, Signs, The Terrifying Frangibility Of The Human Corpus, Uninvited Explanations Of Literary & Historical Phenomena
Read the review on The Outlet.
The most terrifying aspect of The Murderess—Alexandros Papadiamantis’s famous psychological terror-fable—is the calm and lyrical nature of its prose. As others have said, Modern evil is rational: “Murder [or some other evil] simply must be committed; there is no other logical option [according to my limited human worldview]. Let me tell you why…”
The second-most terrifying aspect of the short, episodic book is its description of a bad-ass Greek sea-eagle:
…In the forest that crowned all the western slopes… there it was said that a sea-eagle had nested for three human generations… In its abandoned nest was found an entire museum of monstrous bones of sea-snakes, seals, dogfish and other marine monsters, which the huge, powerful bird, with its blue hooked beak and is vast cinder-coloured wings, had picked out of the seas…
WTF. Remind me not to mess with a bird that eats seals and sea-snakes. (Or, per the rest of the book, killer grandmamas…)