Act of love
Act of Love (English original title: Act of Love ) is a novel by the American author Joe R. Lansdale . The crime and horror novel first appeared in the United States in 1981. In 2010 the novel was published in Germany in a translation by Gabriele Bärtels with a foreword by Andrew Vachss at Heyne Verlag in Munich.
The book is about a serial killer who brutally mutilated and murdered his victims while being raped, and the Houston police are investigating to find the killer. It was the author's first complete novel and is one of the early splatter novels .
General and formal structure
The story portrayed in the act of love is entirely fictional. The novel consists of a prologue entitled "The Beginning ..." and is then divided into three parts ("The Beginning ...", "The Beast Generates Teeth" and "The End of Everything"), each into several chapters be divided. Neither the parts nor the chapters have titles, but are numbered and are further subdivided by intermediate sections that are overwritten with points in time in the story. A short epilogue ends . The entire book is reproduced from the position of a narrator, who has both insight into the concrete plot as well as into the thoughts and memories of the people. The narrator mainly accompanies the police officer Marvin Hanson and his colleague Joe Clark, but in some chapters he also describes the activities of other people such as the murderer or the reporter Philip Barlowe. With a few exceptions, the entire story takes place in Houston , Texas , although the specific locations vary. The order of the narration is chronological, the depiction of the acts of violence in the book is very detailed.
The actual story is introduced by several quotes from Michael Le Faucheur , William Shakespeare , Millan Stray and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as the poem The Psycho's Song by the author Mignon Glass . The individual parts are also introduced with various quotations.
The German version of the book also begins with a dedication: For Marie Louise Lansdale and my wife Karen. This is followed by a foreword by Andrew Vachss , who introduces the novel and Joe R. Lansdale as the author. The epilogue of the story closes with an afterword by Joe R. Lansdale from 1992.
action
The prologue of the novel Act of Love begins with the depiction of a brutal murder in a ghetto in Houston, Texas called Pearl Harbor . An unknown man assaults a young woman and brutally kills her with a bayonet with which he slits open her abdomen while he is raping her. The perpetrator cuts off the victim's breasts and takes them home. The girl is found shortly afterwards by the homeless Smokey and identified as the prostitute Bella Louise. Contrary to his urge to flee, he reports the find to the police.
Police officers Marvin Hanson and his colleague Joe Clark are in charge of the case. They are supported by the pathologist Doc Warren, from whom Hanson later also gets advice on the perpetrator's psychology. Hanson is a black police officer who hails from the ghetto and now lives in Pasadena , a suburb of Houston, with his wife Rachel and daughter JoAnna . During the investigation, the investigators repeatedly run into reporter Philip Barlow, who follows the story of the Houston hacker and cannibalizes it for his scandal-oriented newspaper. In his articles he refers to inside information from police circles and attacks the investigators openly, after his first publication he also receives a letter from the murderer, which he prints in the newspaper. In another letter to Hanson, the killer also announced further murders.
“Don't be offended, cops. Here is your personal message: I'll get you real work soon. "
The second part begins with an account of the Houston hacker's home and his background and the beginning of his necrophilous acts. The section describes in detail his first love for a girl, whom he did not dare to approach and how, after she was killed and buried in an accident, he opened her grave and satisfied himself with the corpse and then took her head with him and many more Times for satisfaction. Then the second murder in the series of murders is described, in which the Houston hacker killed the young student Evelyn DeMarka in her apartment and raped her; the perpetrator takes the victim's heart with him. Here, too, Hanson leads the investigations together with Clark and for the first time it is shown that Hanson intends not to bring the murderer to court, contrary to the law, but to kill in vigilante justice :
“He also decided that after he captured the beast, the guy would have a little accident on the way to the station. He was sure the hacker would do something rash. Escape, for example. In this case, Hanson resolved to fire the warning shot into the back of the hacker's head. "
This murder was also cannibalized by Barlowe in his newspaper and led to a definite fear of the people in Houston of the killer. Hanson gets into the case and spends sleepless nights, which worries his wife too. Shortly afterwards, Barlowe receives another letter from the hacker and calls the police, Hanson opens the letter and shortly afterwards attacks Barlowe, accusing him and the editor-in-chief Evans of complicit in the acts and the panic in the city with their form of reporting. Clark can de-escalate the dispute, but Barlowe takes up the allegation and publishes an article with an attack on Hanson and the police.
In the meantime it becomes clear that the source of information for Barlowe is the police officer James Milo. Milo desperately needs money to treat his son, who has polio, and Barlowe pays him for information from the police station. Since he has the feeling that Hanson is on him, he wants to stop and give no more information. The last information he gives the reporter is the assumption that a policeman might be behind the murders and the discovery of a button that belongs to a rain jacket from the body of the last victim. Shortly thereafter, Clark confronts him when he catches him copying sensitive files, but declines to file a complaint. Milo meets with Barlowe one last time and informs him that he is no longer available.
The murderer's third victim is Patricia Quentin, whom he approaches in front of her house and then murders in her house; here too the murderer takes parts of the woman's body with him and it is mentioned for the first time that he cooks human flesh for eating. Shortly afterwards, Hanson receives a box delivered to his house containing the victim's cut hand and a threat and clues about the victim who has not yet been found:
“Next time it's your wife and daughter, nigger. I watch them all the time. "
Hanson panics and wants to protect his family and tells Rachel about the contents of the letter. He immediately thinks of his daughter, who wanted to go to the drive-in theater with her boyfriend Tommy Rae. They are actually followed by a blue van that drives them several times and tries to force them to stop. During the subsequent hunt, the young people's vehicle crashes on the highway and Tommy Rae is killed, the van disappears. Barlowe appears at the scene of the accident while the fire brigade frees JoAnna from the vehicle; Hanson is informed of the accident shortly afterwards and drives to the hospital where she was admitted. In the meantime, the hacker calls the police station and says he wants to "get the nigger and his family" and his boss persuades him to go back home with his family as bait. Hanson reluctantly agrees and promises to stay in the house unarmed. While he waits, he grows into the idea that his partner Joe Clark could be the hacker and when a call comes from Barlowe claiming to have identified the hacker, he leaves the house on a pretext and drives to the address given. When he gets there, he learns that it is Milo's house, who was killed here with his family. Hanson and Barlowe go into the house and find the bodies, after which Barlowe confirms to Hanson that Clark must be the murderer. They split up and Hanson wants to see Clark to take care of this. Meanwhile, the chief of police had asked Clark to drive to Hanson's house as additional protection.
While Hanson searches Clark's apartment and comes across a text typed by Clark, in which Clark suspects that Hanson is the hacker. By comparing a handwriting sample with the address written by Barlowe, he realizes that the reporter he sent to his house is the real killer. In the meantime, he reaches his house and first kills the policemen observing the house, then he gains entry to the house and also kills the policeman who was left there. At that point, Clark arrives at the house and discovers the police officers who have been killed, but is also murdered. Meanwhile, Hanson manages to warn his wife by phone, who is barricading herself in the bedroom with her daughter. While Hanson is racing home, Barlowe enters the bedroom, where Rachel fights him unsuccessfully with a hammer. He brutally pushes her away and yanks her hair, then he takes the hammer and drives a nail through the palm of her hand into the wall. At that moment Hanson storms into the apartment and Barlowe lets go of her. In the following fight Hanson is wounded by the bayonet, but he manages to kill Barlowe with a handrail.
The epilogue shows that Hanson ended his career in the police force after the funeral of his colleague Clark.
Background and reception
Act of Love was Joe R. Lansdale's first full novel. According to his own statement, he wanted to write something very strong and new with the novel, and above all to emphasize the violence. He was strongly guided by the work of the director Sam Peckinpah , since at that time splatter novels like those of Clive Barker and horror films were not yet available. He also wrote the novel in anger that psychopaths and murderers received so much attention in society when their victims did not. For this reason, he wrote a butcher scene with which he wanted to build sympathy for the victim.
In the epilogue of the novel, written in 1992, Lansdale himself presented his motivation for the novel. He had written and published a few short stories up to that point, although he had not yet written a novel, and with this first major work was mainly based on the work of Ed McBain , Dean Koontz , John Ball and Richard Matheson . Wanting to write a crime thriller set in his home state of Texas , he chose Houston because he assumed the location had to be a big city and even though he hated the city. His wife was studying criminology at the time and was working on the book Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm , which made him look at acts like those of Richard Speck and Charles Whitman and inspired the plot and, above all, the brutality.
After the book was finished, Lansdale tried to sell it to a publisher through his agent, but initially received only rejections, even though various editors praised him for the book. It was eventually adopted by Zebra Books, where it was published in 1981.
expenditure
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Act of Love , Zebra Books 1981
- Act of love , Heyne, Munich 2010
- Act of love , 2nd edition, Heyne Hardcore, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-453-67586-5
supporting documents
- ↑ Joe R. Lansdale: Act of Love , 2nd Edition 2014; Cover sheet II; Pp. 12-13.
- ↑ Joe R. Lansdale: Act of Love , 2nd Edition 2013; Cover sheet.
- ↑ Andrew Vachss : Foreword , In Joe R. Lansdale: Act of Love , 2nd Edition 2014; Pp. 7-11.
- ↑ a b c Joe R. Lansdale: Afterword , In Joe R. Lansdale: Act of Love , 2nd Edition 2014; Pp. 275-282.
- ↑ Joe R. Lansdale: Afterword , In Joe R. Lansdale: Act of Love , 2nd Edition 2014; P. 76.
- ↑ Joe R. Lansdale: Afterword , In Joe R. Lansdale: Act of Love , 2nd Edition 2014; P. 93.
- ↑ Joe R. Lansdale: Afterword , In Joe R. Lansdale: Act of Love , 2nd Edition 2014; P. 189.
- ^ Robert R. McCammon interviews with Joe R. Lansdale , interview with Joe R. Lansdale from October 1989; Retrieved May 29, 2016.