Nick and I can’t wait, have been talking about the book signing all day. Not that either of us have read or even plan on reading an Anne Perry novel. But we know the author's history, the secret she revealed after the Peter Jackson movie was released. It was the first time she spoke of it publicly. Her past life, before she moved abroad and changed her name. We imagine she still thinks about it every day. The heaviness of the rock in her hands as she brought it down on her lover’s mother’s head. How slow the skull was to shatter. How the woman refused to die quickly.
Nick calls her My Favorite Murderess. She's mine too.
I saw Heavenly Creatures during my first year of college. Melanie Lynskey and Kate Winslet play two teenage girls in 1950s New Zealand whose friendship develops into something more intimate and obsessive. A group of us in the dorm gathered in my friend Bryn’s room and watched the movie in silence. When it was done I left and curled up in my bed and wept and wished I would one day know that kind of desperate love. I was that young.
Nick is a horror movie fanatic who only listens to music about chasing girls. Of course he was into the film.
Our shift crawls by. We shelve CDs, ring up customers, count down the hours. Night falls. From the register we see one of the managers escort a middle-aged woman to the open area in the back where we keep the children’s books. Soon more middle-aged women file in. We hear Anne Perry’s voice come out of the PA speakers from across the store. Forty minutes later she is done speaking. There is a round of applause. Nick and I abandon our coworker Meredith and run to the back.
I'm twenty-one and Nick is pushing thirty. We are easily the youngest people in the room. We each grab a copy of Perry's newest mass-market thriller from the display table and get in line for an autograph. When it’s my turn I can hardly look the author in the eye. She sighs and signs my book, knowing full well I only care that she killed someone and somebody made a movie about it. That she’ll be lucky if I ever read a word of her writing.
I say thank you and she says thank you with practiced grace.
Nick and I make our way back to the music section of the store. Both of us shake with guilt and excitement. Nick puts his copy of the book aside, buys it after he deposits his next paycheck. I hide mine in a drawer for a few weeks before I liberate it from the shop.
It doesn't take long for me to realize how much of an exploitative little shit I've been. To fetishize the crimes of children. To think nothing of how courageous Anne Perry was to seek pleasure and comfort in a same sex relationship. Especially when she was so young. I tell myself I'll make it up to her. I'll read her book. But I never do.
Maybe if it had been a best-seller whose ubiquity I couldn't avoid. My partner Xtina got a paperback copy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo while doing research in New York. She bought all the sequels when they came out in hardcover. It took me over a year, but I finally figured, what the hell, pulled the first book off the shelf, and dove in.
I had only finished the first few chapters when Xtina asked how it was. Expository, I said. Which was kind of an elitist dick thing to say. I've read and enjoyed a lot of genre fiction. And I enjoyed this book too, mostly, with all its lurid Vanger family intrigue. Though the soft-core torture porn towards the end kinda got to me. I don't really have the stomach for graphic violence anymore. Not unless it's a crime of passion, committed by a teenage girl, reenacted by Kate Winslet, directed by Peter Jackson.
