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Showing posts from January 18, 2011

Real-life Noir: A Master Exposes the Seamy Underbelly

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An impressionable young boy, later haunted in adulthood by one simple, rather ordinary act committed as a ten-year-old child... that of wishing his own mother dead. It was a wish-- a curse, really --which all-too-soon would come tragically true, when the mother was found strangled to death. Years of unhappiness and uncertainty followed, as the boy struggled to make sense out of the horrific event he was secretly sure he’d somehow caused... An endless search for something, anything , to give some meaning to the inexplicable event or to mask the pain...  The inexorable, downward spiral into the welcoming arms of drugs and alcohol, and finally to crime-- breaking & entering, peeping at windows; sinking ever deeper into a pit of despair and depravity... It could be fodder for a story about a serial killer in the making (or about someone who “went postal”, turned to religion, or earned a stay in a fine correctional facility, with complimentary orange jumpsuit included). Instead, it’s