Vendor
	Fritz Agency Christian Dittus
Original language
English

THE JOY OF KILLING

Harry N. MacLean

This fever dream begins on a stormy night at a lake house in the woods of Minnesota, where we are introduced to a college professor who a few years earlier had written a novel in which he justified a gruesome campus murder under the nihilistic theory that there is no right or wrong, no moral center to man's activity. The writer returns to the lake house where he had spent his childhood summers and locks himself in the attic, intent on writing the final story of his life. Playing on a continuous loop in his mind are key moments in his past: his childhood in small-town Iowa, where he and his best friend befriended a local drifter; his childhood on the lake where one summer a local boy drowned in a storm; and the central fixation of his erotic meeting with a girl on a train bound for Chicago when he was just 15. All of these threads weave together as the writer tries to piece together the multitude of secrets and acts of violence that make up one human life. With its elegant structure, haunting language and edge-of-your-seat suspense, THE JOY OF KILLING is a brilliant fiction debut by one of America's premier writers of true crime.

Available products
Book Published 2015-07-01 by Counterpoint

Comments

[...] this brilliant first novel from Edgar Award- winning true crime writer MacLean (In Broad Daylight)....MacLean skillfully takes readers along as the narrator spins and stumbles through a tangle of disturbing meditations on innocence and guilt. -- Publisher's Weekly, starred review

A masterfully constructed hall of mirrors, Edgar Award-winning true crime writer Harry N. MacLean's The Joy of Killing reinvents the conventional thriller. While its surface is a slick entertainment, MacLean dedicates much of his savvy novelistic debut to a deeply unsettling interrogation of the relationship between violence and human psychology, exploring the questions of criminality and deviance that define his chosen genre. Told in dark lyrical prose and revealing a master's command of the form, it's a rousing - though not an unqualified - success - I devoured it greedily, in part because MacLean writes gripping prose, in part because the book is masterfully constructed, and in part, yes, because of those lurid details. --- Los Angeles Review of Books

The author interviewed on public radio, click here: https://www.cpr.org/news/story/denver-writer-harry-maclean-explores-joy-killing-new-novel Read more...

Italy: Fazi Editore;

A dizzying and delirious meditation on desire, violence, guilt, and philosophical justification.

As frightening as it is compelling "The Joy of Killing" - the title comes from a Mark Twain quote - is an unnerving work. Maclean writes about the self-serving nature of evil, the thrill of violence, the amorality of humans...This is a disturbing novel and one that is impossible to set aside as it draws the reader toward a startling conclusion. Maclean is a master not only of story, but of words. The writing is too lyrical to categorize the book as just a thriller. The Joy of Killing is a noir literary work, a relentless tale about the dark side of the human soul. --The Denver Post A masterfully constructed hall of mirrors, Edgar Award-winning true crime writer Harry N. MacLean's The Joy of Killing reinvents the conventional thriller. While its surface is a slick entertainment, MacLean dedicates much of his savvy novelistic debut to a deeply unsettling interrogation of the relationship between violence and human psychology, exploring the questions of criminality and deviance that define his chosen genre. Told in dark lyrical prose and revealing a master's command of the form, it's a rousing - though not an unqualified - success. I devoured it greedily, in part because MacLean writes gripping prose, in part because the book is masterfully constructed, and in part, yes, because of those lurid details. --Los Angeles Review of Books

Interview with Harry MacLean. Read more...

As frightening as it is compelling "The Joy of Killing " - the title comes from a Mark Twain quote- is an unnerving work. Maclean writes about the self-serving nature of evil, the thrill of violence, the amorality of humans.This is a disturbing novel and one that is impossible to set aside as it draws the reader toward a startling conclusion. Maclean is a master not only of story, but of words. The writing is too lyrical to categorize the book as just a thriller. The Joy of Killing is a noir literary work, a relentless tale about the dark side of the human soul. -- The Denver Post

Not since American Psycho has there been a novel as unnerving and relentless as Harry N. Maclean's compulsively readable The Joy of Killing. Inventive. Supremely twisted. And did I say unnerving. -- Gregg Olson, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Harry MacLean has long been without peer at performing the alchemy required to turn the often banal facts of true crime into narratives as alluring as any fiction. In The Joy of Killing, he focuses his profound talents on a lyrical, relentless story that is at once literary and hardboiled. The Joy of Killing is an unblinking vision into a world where the currencies are elastic versions of eroticism, memory, tragedy, and violence, where a measure of vertigo is the norm, and where morality is a variable, never a constant. A complex, stunning novel. - Stephen White