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My name is William Colton Hughes. You haven't heard of me.
Columbine was a paradigm shift in Occidental culture. America spent over three decades being afraid of serial killers like David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy and the immortal Zodiac, so much that transcendent fictional alter egos like Hannibal Lecter and Patrick Bateman were created. Then, one fateful morning, a more terrifying and unpredictable menace became the object of media obsessions and rendered serial killers obsolete. That doesn't mean they ceased to exist. If anything, this era might be some sort of golden years for serial killers, sheltered from media scrutiny. We have no way to know. THE LEAST OF MY SCARS, by Stephen Graham Jones is a novel that gives serial killer fiction a brand new set of fangs for this boogeyman to chew its way out of cultural oblivion.
William Colton Hughes has it all figured out. He's living a quiet and comfortable life for a serial killer, having his victims delivered to his doorstep by a mysterious benefactor. The fragile balance of his existence is blown into pieces when the flow of victims is suddenly interrupted for a reason Hughes ignores. Our already whacked out serial killer comes to question the very fabric of his reality. Is he in control of his own destiny, or is he somebody else's prisoner? Is the mysterious benefactor some sort of prison warden attempting to keep Hughes under wraps? Reality slowly dislocates and Hughes will have to confront a couple ghosts in order to save himself from the fate most serial killer eventually have to embrace.
Am I wrong to believe that THE LEAST OF MY SCARS is a badass fucking title for a novel? It sounds like a ton of bricks to your face. It's one of these titles that combines originality, straightforwardness and just enough allegory to be intriguing. But is it a good novel? It's about the most terrifying serial killer novel I've read since, I don't know, Andrew Klavan's DON'T SAY A WORD, maybe? Not that I find serial killer fiction particularly frightening or original, but THE LEAST OF MY SCARS stands out from the flock through the abstract nightmare that Stephen Graham Jones has patiently built around William Colton Hughes, like a death sentence by immurement.
William Colton Hughes has it all figured out. He's living a quiet and comfortable life for a serial killer, having his victims delivered to his doorstep by a mysterious benefactor. The fragile balance of his existence is blown into pieces when the flow of victims is suddenly interrupted for a reason Hughes ignores. Our already whacked out serial killer comes to question the very fabric of his reality. Is he in control of his own destiny, or is he somebody else's prisoner? Is the mysterious benefactor some sort of prison warden attempting to keep Hughes under wraps? Reality slowly dislocates and Hughes will have to confront a couple ghosts in order to save himself from the fate most serial killer eventually have to embrace.
Am I wrong to believe that THE LEAST OF MY SCARS is a badass fucking title for a novel? It sounds like a ton of bricks to your face. It's one of these titles that combines originality, straightforwardness and just enough allegory to be intriguing. But is it a good novel? It's about the most terrifying serial killer novel I've read since, I don't know, Andrew Klavan's DON'T SAY A WORD, maybe? Not that I find serial killer fiction particularly frightening or original, but THE LEAST OF MY SCARS stands out from the flock through the abstract nightmare that Stephen Graham Jones has patiently built around William Colton Hughes, like a death sentence by immurement.
Im a haze the next morning, trying to blind away the sunlight I usually just drink, I make my way through the short door and into the lefthand apartment. As for any dreams I might have had, they were from the marble swimming through my veins, so hardly count.
THE LEAST OF MY SCARS is not an easy novel to read (see quotation above). I've lost the highway quite a couple times, trying to establish a reading pace. I don't blame Stephen Graham Jones for building the narrative the way he did, but please know that this novel is not for seekers of cheap thrills. What makes it so different than you run-of-the-mill serial killer novel is that reality becomes more threatening to William Colton Hughes as it's supposed to be for his victim. Stephen Graham Jones attempts the genre literature stunt of showing an empathizing view of an unredeemable character and somewhat succeeds. Everything about THE LEAST OF MY SCARS is broken and jagged and disembodied, but it's an unflinching reflection of the struggle of a damage mind to reclaim dominion over his own reality.
I know what you're going to say: ''It's been done already, Hannibal Lecter got us to empathize with the bad guy, back when A Flock of Seagulls were playing on the radio.'' Maybe so, except that Lecter was calm, collected, seducing and always in control. You never really felt that he was sick, just plain evil (yet oddly moral) and that's boring to me. William Colton Hughes is the opposite of boring. He's an allegory for our broken individualism and a dynamic literary construction with a shattered sense of reality. THE LEAST OF MY SCARS is difficult, it will require your time and your dedication, but it's a novel that goes a lot further than your typical peek-a-boo scare. It'll crawl under your skin and give you the paranoid fear that someone is waiting to have you delivered to his doorstep in the dead of night.
