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Friends,

As someone who writes quite a bit about violence, I wonder why our imaginations bend towards it. More specifically, the contours of murder. Murder is at once melodramatic, preposterous, horrifying, and cruel.

And murderers? The most common approach to murderers is that they are monsters. But is this idea just an attempt to divest ourselves and distance ourselves from the possibility that we are capable of it?

And yet, we are all connected to murder, whether we’re in the military or related to someone who is, whether we ignore policies of desk killers or have an awareness of the death and destruction connected to our everyday consumer choices.

To think through this, I invited Mark O’Connell onto the show. Mark’s latest book, A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention, and Murder investigates two murders in Ireland via conversations with the murderer, Malcolm MacCarthur.

Mark’s obsession with the murders as a child followed him into adulthood, as he became a scholar studying the fictional works of the great Irish writer John Banville, particularly Banville’s novel The Book of Evidence.

But Mark, like so many of us, found us still mulling over a story of violence. Which led him, eventually, to sitting down for extended periods of time with the man at the center of the violent crimes. What did he learn about murder and our fascination with it?

Mark is one of the best chroniclers and observers of the currents of the world. And he’s been on the show multiple times. Most recently in conversation with me and Peter Rollins on AEWCH 200 (pt 2), with me and Caitlin Doughty about horror on AEWCH 194, and his first appearance – on which we talked about the apocalypse just as the pandemic was starting – on AEWCH 105.

His two other books also feature difficult people: doomsday preppers in Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back and transhumanists in To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death.

I’m so excited to share this episode with you.

SHOW NOTES

WHAT OTHER AEWCH EPISODE YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO?
AEWCH 162 is one of my very favorite episodes. On it, I talk with Dr. Gwen Adshead. Gwen is a forensic psychiatrist and co-author of The Devil You Know: Stories of Human Cruelty and Compassion and speaks with violent offenders in her daily work. The book is a compliment to Mark’s book, and I know the episode even had an effect on Mark as he was writing A Thread...

WHAT BOOK SHOULD YOU READ?
Another truly great nonfiction book about murder is Emmanuel Carrere’s The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception. Aside from that, so much of my understanding of violence – at least understanding I’ve gotten from reading – comes from fiction. Some of the best fiction about murderers, violent offenders, and their victims are by Joyce Carol Oates. One I have in mind, “The Girl with the Blackened Eye” is in her collection, I Am No One You Know.

MORE ON MARK
Mark’s website is here, though admittedly sparse. You can also check out his excellent essay on the relevance of JG Ballard. And here’s a great interview with Mark on Utopian Horizons. And here’s a short interview with Mark about A Thread… at Slate.