The best magazine
" We live in a very violent world, and I reflect that world, unfortunately.
See my website http://www.
senneffhouse.
com to see the way my books portray and exploit our taste for violence.
The daily news from Iraq convinces us that we live in a world of violence as do the large number of killings in the United States on a daily basis.
Our television shows, movies and video games are saturated with violence.
Blood and spilled guts seem to be the main images in our media.
Our news programs and media in general routinely report bloody events.
After a while I think we become numbed, immune to it.
We take it for granted that violence is part of daily life, part of the human condition.
The recent ghastly mass killings in the Virginia college by a lone student gunman became our biggest news story for several days.
The calm of a quiet academic place was shattered by the rapid gunfire of the crazed shooter.
Where people should be safe and sheltered, they were found to helpless targets of a rampage.
So why do I use violence in my novels and seemingly compound the problem? Am I not making the situation worse? First you have to get your reader into your story.
You have to hook the reader.
The way that many readers get hooked into a story is by presenting violent situations.
It is an unfortunate fact of life.
A tea party in a drawing room won't hook most readers--unless perhaps there is a gunman hiding behind the drapes.
A novelist mirrors the world around him or her, and if that world is a world of violence then the writer often has to use it--to get the reader's attention, to make a point, to provide context to the story, to provide a mirror image of the real everyday world.
We are trapped by this constant and pervasive violence.
It destroys our capacity for compassion and our sense of shock, of shame and disgust.
We are inoculated--have become too complacent to the contagionand culture of violence in our society.
In "Nine Lives Too Many" I was writing a terrorist thriller that dealt with the nine bloody terrorist assaults that a terrorist, Felix the Cat, made on New York City and Washington, DC.
It was a bloody book full of bombings and gory attacks.
I make no apologies for that fact.
It was a book of savagery, of the wild rampage of a sociopath.
Was he a killer because he was a terrorist with a "cause," or was he a sociopath who was venting his inner madness? "The Daemon in Our Dreams" begins with the assassination of three persons in a staid London hotel.
Why they were killed becomes a question for the reader.
Perhaps they were killed to hook the readers into the story.
If so, wouldn't that involve pure cynicism on my part? But bear in mind I am writing fiction, thrillers at that, not fairy tales.
I'm not trying to write like Jane Austen.
She lived in a cloistered, tiny world of social graces and gentility.
The England of her day was loud, boisterous, and often cruelly violent, but she mirrored only the speck of the world that she chose to portray, her microcosm.
Perhaps writers use violence in a story the same way they use sex in a story.
Because it is an essential part of the storytelling, not gratuitous but necessary for what they are telling you about the characters and the plot.
Perhaps sex and violence are linked.
Some sex certainly involves aggression and turbulence.
But violence is really much more akin to rape with the element of force, combativeness, and the clash of human wills.
Love and sex should be the opposites of violence, the antidote to force and coercion.
Violence is often a response, an answer to a situation.
Not the kind of response we would want, but it is decisive, fast, and often a final answer to a problem.
In nature there is a great deal of violence.
The animal and insect communities are rife with acts of violence.
It is not only the human species that resorts to violence.
The animal hunter goes after his prey, and he uses violence to fulfill his ends and acquire food.
Is there anything that can be called purposeful about violence? The gangsters, the terrorists, and the military practice what they consider to be purposeful and to them necessary violence.
The one or several gunmen who kill innocent victims to appease their nuttiness--is that in any way purposeful? Violence destroys, kills, and maims.
It is an assault on reason, sanity, civilization and the social contract, but it exists.
Religion has sometimes used violence to achieve theological purposes.
What a terrible irony there is in that.
In a perfect world there would be no violence.
My novels do not portray a perfect world.
They delineate the imperfect world we are stuck with--a world of corruption, of hatred, cruelty, venality, and yes, of violence.
This imperfect creature, therefore, pleads guilty to perpetuating not the ideal world, but this shattered world we live in.
My novels are not shining stars of perfection, but little explorations of the real world.
Read 'em and weep.
Source: ...