On the plus side, I was glad to see that you followed my advice and got rid of that young lady. It was a bold move making her your first subject this year. I was fully expecting her to come second or third in the running order. Putting her at the top was a nice surprise, and the way in which you dispensed with her was nothing short of brilliant. You did not reveal before that her name was April. Knowing this, it makes wonderful felicitous sense that the deaths this year should commence with April first. Not only that, but the manner of her demise—liquefaction in an industrial meat-grinder—was a delicious linguistic/culinary calembour: you literally made an “April fool” of her.
On the minus side—and the minuses significantly outweigh the pluses, I am afraid—I found the rest of the submission to be lacking in inspiration and inventiveness. The stabbing of the Israeli student with a swordfish was mildly amusing, making reference as it did to one of the putative origins of April Fool pranks, the Christian practice in the Middle Ages of attaching paper fish to the backs of Jews and other non-Christians. It also seemed like a tired retread of last year’s death-by-frozen-trout, and typifies the general dearth of subtlety in your approach this time. Really, what with all the hackings and loppings and slashings and slicings and skewerings and sunderings you undertook, I felt as though I were watching a Webster play, as directed by Ken Russell perhaps. Where you have hitherto displayed finesse, you now seem intent on wallowing in excess and crudity. Delivering death with sharp implements is, per se, not enough. Without wit, it becomes an exercise in mere butchery. Any infant can wield a sharp object and cause damage. Violence is child’s play. What raises mass-murder to a level of maturity is a refinement, a guiding intelligence, an over-all sensitivity to the loftier implications of the deed. The aptness of a choice of weapon, the poetic justice of a particular location, the ability to improvise using the materials to hand—these are the things that make homicide an entertainment, that transmute manslaughter into man’s laughter. And these are the things in which your submission this year is almost wholly deficient. I suspect you knew this, and that is why you elected to dress up your text and pictures with fancy, “difficult” stylings, using tricks of form to distract attention away from paucity of content. Remember: eggs and bacon is still eggs and bacon, no matter how many sprigs of parsley you put on the plate.
As I said in my opening paragraph, the hat-trick is very hard to pull off. Indeed I cannot think of anyone, off the top of my head, who has started as strongly as you did and then kept the momentum up and the quality consistent through two subsequent outings. It was perhaps inevitable that you would lose your way at some point (although I must admit I had hopes that you would prove the exception to the rule). You have just under a year in which to devise your next spree, and also, of course, to recover from the shotgun wounds inflicted on you by your penultimate subject. (Incidentally, I can provide you with the telephone number of a surgeon if you want, a very discreet fellow whose speciality is facial reconstruction. It may be, of course, that you prefer disfigurement. Many of your kind do.) Might I suggest that you spend this period of retrenchment and recuperation wisely, using it as an opportunity to ask yourself why you are doing what you do and what you are really intending to achieve. Obviously, having left so many people dead, you are running short of subjects for whom you harbour a legitimate hatred, or even a mild grudge, and with this reduction in personal animosity towards your targets there may well come a concomitant decline in enthusiasm for your task. I have seen this many times before. The fire no longer burns in the belly. Now is the time, then, to address yourself to your work intellectually. Where heart and anger have so far carried you, the brain can continue to carry you. If you can make the transition from emotional to cerebral engagement, and make it successfully, there is no reason why you should not go on to have a long and fruitful career.
I wish you the best of luck,
X
Dear Fool-Killer,
Last year I suggested, did I not, that if you wished to re-attain the heights of you first two offerings, you needed to ponder deeply on the nature and purpose of your enterprise. Did you pay any heed? I would say, on the evidence before me, that you did not.
Where do I begin? This is, literally as well as metaphorically, hack work. Hack work of the lowest order. Dull, trudging, turgid, vapid, illuminated by not the slightest sparkle of wit, not the least glimmer of irony, not the tiniest flicker of anything approaching skill or proficiency or even competence. Were this an offering from a first-timer, I would make allowances for its inadequacies. I would give it credit for, if nothing else, existing. I would regard it with the indulgence commonly reserved for amateur efforts, commending it not for the way it was done but rather for the fact that it had been done at all. I can scarcely believe that the author of this submission is the same Fool-Killer who orchestrated two such superb nights of mayhem (and a third that was somewhat less enthralling but still had much to recommend it). It is almost as if a different person has donned your jester mask and gone around impersonating you, badly, perhaps in order to traduce your reputation and turn you into a figure of fun.
Where are the lethal tricks? What has become of the April Fool theme that was your calling card and, if I might be so bold, your raison d’être? What, for God’s sake, has happened to the body-count? Half as many subjects means half as much fun. And all killed in the same way! One after another, meeting their Maker like pigs in an abattoir—repetitive, boring in the extreme, unimaginative, bland. Production-line termination. And the murder weapon? A cudgel with little tinkly bells on it. What were you thinking?
I am having trouble finding words to convey my contempt, and not just my contempt but my shame. I offered you, courtesy of my critic’s expertise in this field, a reasonable proposition for hauling yourself out of the doldrums, and this is how you repay me, with an offering so shoddy, so entirely bereft of any redeeming feature, that it seems almost a deliberate insult, a slap in the face. A quick glance again at your Polaroids shows me a half-dozen corpses lying in various sprawled poses in hotel rooms. They could be bodies anywhere, subjects of anything from a poison-gas attack to a military coup in a Third World country. There is no sense that any of them deserved to die, any of them in some way invited their own end. You say that they are all joke-shop proprietors, there at the hotel for a trade convention. So what? You say that their hand-buzzers and whoopee cushions and squirting buttonhole flowers and chilli-pepper chewing gum and exploding cigarettes were driving you crazy. I do not believe you. Annoyance is not an adequate motive for murder. If someone or something irritates us, we become peeved, we become angry, but not so intensely that we kill. There is righteous vengeance, and then there is petty, vindictive score-settling. I suspect you picked on joke-shop proprietors simply because their profession happens to have a vague connection with April Fools and all things prank-related. You may see this as expanding your range. I call it desperation.
Would that there were anything to praise in this latest effort of yours. The most I suppose I can do is comment favourably on the fact that you allowed one of your subjects to claw at your mask and pull it off, exposing the damaged face beneath. A scary moment, I imagine, for the fellow concerned, but frankly this kind of shock revelation is nothing new, and in my opinion cheapens what has gone before. Never removing your mask allows us, your observers, your audience, to project our own fears and illusions onto the unseen physiognomy of its wearer. Remaining essentially faceless, or at any rate being identifiable only by the features of a factory-moulded face-mimicking piece of plastic, fixes and isolates you in our imaginations. You become powerfully, mysteriously, indelibly iconic. The moment we are permitted a glimpse behind the curtain, we see the little old man working the levers; we become the boy who perceived that the emperor was naked. All is lost in the realisation that you are just a human being, with eyes and nose and lips, and not some quasi-immortal manifestation of the id, an ur-monster that has crawled its way out of the swampy morass of our collec
tive consciousness.
I am posting your new submission on the website not so that others might admire it—they will not—but so that it might serve as an instructive example, an object lesson in the misapplication of creativity. It is terrible to see a once-promising career descend into dismal, listless insipidity. If I were you, I would give serious consideration to whether it was worth my while carrying on. Sometimes it is nobler to admit that one’s well has run dry than to keep dredging up mud from the bottom.
I wish you well in whatever endeavours you from here on pursue,
X
Dear Fool-Killer,
So you have at last joined the online community. Welcome to our little virtual enclave, our clandestine coterie of artists and aficionados.
And welcome back, Fool-Killer of old! Your fifth annual offering is a definite return to form, and I flatter myself that I am in part responsible for this renaissance. Your text certainly seems to indicate as much, citing my harsh review last time as the stimulus that prompted you into a sincere and thoroughgoing re-evaluation of yourself and your craft, your aims, your goals, with the result that you were artistically reinvigorated and attacked your work (and your subjects!) with a renewed zeal. Tributes such as this make the life of a humble critic worthwhile. If I am able, through my firm-but-fair judgements, to foment and foster creativity, then I have, in some small way, contributed to the cause of art, and there can be no greater satisfaction than that.
This year’s submission is at once your most personal yet, and your most intricately structured. The multi-layered, self-reflexive aspects of it operate beautifully, better than other examples of this construction that I have seen in the past. Opening your text with a quotation from my last piece—“It is almost as if a different person has donned your jester mask …”—excellently sets us up for the sham revelation that it was not you running amok in that hotel last year after all but instead someone inspired by your previous works to put on an identical (and appropriately pellet-shredded) mask and go about slaughtering joke-shop proprietors in a kind of inelegant homage to the genuine Fool-Killer. Claiming that the impostor came across your work on a website not dissimilar to this one is a deftly tongue-in-cheek touch. Normally I am not a fan of postmodernism, but I cannot deny that in this instance I found the adoption of it effective and, all personal considerations aside, pleasing.
I was also pleased that, as well as managing by this means effectively to excise last year’s submission from your canon, you have been able to link this year’s offering directly back to your earlier works. Reintroducing April, or at least a girl remarkably similar to her in appearance, imbues the text and digital-camera pictures with a sense of continuity and perhaps, dare I say it, of nostalgia. Not only that but it has allowed you to explore, with ferocious self-awareness and honesty, the traumatic event which impelled you in the first place to seek an outlet for your thoughts and feelings in the medium you have chosen. Your account of the childhood prank which left you physically and emotionally scarred is as affecting as any I have read. There is nothing worse than when a practical joke goes awry—in your case, when the school bullies slipped a powder into your orange juice believing it to be baking soda, whereas in fact it was caustic soda. Luckily for you, you swallowed only a sip, although of course that sip was enough to leave you, in your words, “spitting blood for a week and shitting blood for a fortnight”. Unluckily for April, your friend at the time, she was the one who brought the drink to you, unaware that it had been doctored. This adds tremendous pathos to the fact that, for three years running, you terrorised her and her friends and family, when all along she was innocent of harming you. Using a lookalike to enable you to confront and acknowledge this self-damning truth was a masterstroke.
This year’s deaths, too, are once more of a high standard, and because you have confined yourself to members of the gang of bullies, now adults, who inflicted the orange-juice prank on you all those years ago, you have rediscovered the inner logic and thematic unity missing from your previous two offerings. The climactic treatment of the erstwhile gang’s ringleader is particularly rewarding, and your pictures of him literally vomiting his guts out are classic grand guignol, images of apposite retribution that neither Breughel nor, at the other end of the scale, Vincent Price would have been ashamed to be associated with.
If I have one niggling reservation, it is that you conclude your text with a description of one further killing, that of the moderator of the website where last year’s “fake” Fool-Killer discovered the work of the “real” Fool-Killer. This struck me as a superfluous and over-obvious touch. I appreciate that this year’s submission is all about playing games with reality, with the intention that by dismissing certain former truths as fiction you may arrive at a deeper artistic truth, or at any rate create the illusion of doing so. I think, however, that you can take deconstruction a step too far, especially when the facts—I, the real-life counterpart of your final subject, am still alive and writing this to you—contradict your textual claim.
That aside, I am delighted with this latest addition to your canon, so much so that I have, as you can see, not hesitated in delivering my verdict. Your submission arrived less than an hour ago, and here I am, having set down my thoughts on it already. Such is the swiftness of communication via modern technology that you can send your work to me almost as soon as it is finished and I can supply a commentary on it, if I so wish, straight away. A glance at my onscreen clock tells me it is not yet midnight. If I can wrap this up quickly, I may even be able to send it to you before April 1st is over. I am critiquing your work while the day on which it was created has still a few minutes left to run! I trust you are as amused by that notion as I am.
Yours,
X
Thank you for accessing the Incisive Comments site.
Owing to unforeseen circumstances, activity at this site has now been permanently suspended.
THE BOWDLER STRAIN
1
The Bowdler Strain escaped from the MoD research facility at Chilton Mead in Gloucestershire at 7.30 p.m. on Thursday June 18th.
The point of origin was the facility’s Ideative Manipulation laboratory. The initial vector was none other than the head of Ideative Manipulation, Professor Hugo Bantling.
Scientists, as a race, tend to be sober, serious, even reticent individuals, not unduly prone to vulgarity. Professor Bantling was no exception.
Thus it wasn’t until past ten that evening, when he was preparing his nightcap of cocoa and the milk boiled over, that the professor had cause to realise that he had been exposed to one of his own logoviruses.
By then, of course, it was too late.
2
On his way home Professor Bantling had spoken to:
one of his assistants, Dr Roxanne Quest;
a janitor, Tom Wells;
a colleague, Professor Cyril Prudhomme, head of Communicable Allergy;
the guard at the facility’s main gate (he/she must remain nameless for security reasons);
the attendant at the Texaco garage on the A481 between Chilton Mead and High Leversham, Miss Kylie Bracewell;
the proprietor of the One Stop Foodstore and Off-Licence in High Leversham, Mr Vijay Latif;
and his housekeeper Mrs Barbara McCartney.
To each of these Bantling had offered no more than a couple of dozen words; in the case of the janitor, the security guard, Kylie Bracewell and Vijay Latif, no more than a “thank you” and a “good evening”. Each, nonetheless, was immediately infected, and proceeded to infect numerous others over the course of the rest of the evening, and they in turn infected still others, and so on. So the logovirus was already out of control, effectively an epidemic, long before Professor Bantling became aware of its presence in his own neural system.
When the milk boiled over, sousing the hob in seething white, the professor instantly and reflexively swore. Inattention was to him the greatest sin that anyone—but particularly a man of science—could commit.
The irony here is obvious, for it was the swearing that alerted Bantling to the fact that he or one of his team may have recently committed a far more serious sin of inattention than merely taking your eye off a saucepan of milk for a moment.
“$#!†,” said Bantling.
He blinked.
He frowned.
He repeated the epithet, slowly this time and low-voiced.
“$#!†.”
He clasped a hand to his mouth. A groan escaped him.
Half a minute later he was on the phone to the laboratory.
Half an hour after that, he was back at Chilton Mead, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.
3
Colonel James Nutter, chief of operations at Chilton Mead, had had to endure taunts about his surname since kindergarten. It was this, more than anything, that had burned out of him the tolerance of others’ foibles which each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is born with. Nutter was a toughened shell of a man, almost devoid of empathy. The one thing in life he truly loved was the army, not least because now he had attained high rank nobody ever poked fun at him any more.
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