AMERICAN HONOR KILLINGS, revolting crimes committed by disgusting people

AMERICAN HONOR KILLINGS: Desire and Rage Among Men
DAVID McCONNELL
Akashic Books
$15.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: In American Honor Killings, straight and gay guys cross paths, and the result is murder. But what really happened? What role did hatred play? What were the men involved really like, and what was going on between them when the murder occurred? American Honor Killings explores the truth behind squeamish reporting and uninformed political rants of the far right or fringe left. David McConnell, a New York-based novelist, researched cases from small-town Alabama to San Quentin's death row. The book recounts some of the most notorious crimes of our era.

Beginning in 1999 and lasting until the 2011 conviction of a youth in Queens, New York, the book shows how some murderers think they're cleaning up society. Surprisingly, other killings feel almost preordained, not a matter of the victim's personality or actions so much as a twisted display of a young man's will to compete or dominate. We want to think these stories involve simple sexual conflict, either the killer's internal struggle over his own identity or a fatally miscalculated proposition. They're almost never that simple.

Together, the cases form a secret American history of rage and desire. McConnell cuts through cant and political special pleading to turn these cases into enduring literature. In each story, victims, murderers, friends, and relatives come breathtakingly alive. The result is more soulful, more sensitive, more artful than the sort of "true crime” writing the book was modeled on. A wealth of new detail has been woven into old cases, while new cases are plumbed for the first time. The resulting stories play out exactly as they happened, an inexorable sequence of events—grisly, touching, disturbing, sometimes even with moments of levity.

I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM AKASHIC BOOKS. THANK YOU.

My Review: It is no secret that I'm a leftist, anti-religion queer. I loathe the existence of the systems of "Rightness" that the murderers in these crimes use to justify their actions. The mere ability of a person to point to a bible and have any segment of society secretly or not-so-secretly justify or even agree with the heinous crime of murder is shameful to us as a society.

That said, it's still true. These accounts of the motives and actions of some seriously mentally ill young men, certain that they are Right and they are Correct in the actions, are enlightening and chilling. The cases are appalling...Scott Amedure was shotgunned by a man he confessed to having a crush on on national TV, and his killer is now walking free after serving twenty years...the legal teams for the prosecution of the hate criminals are hampered by public sympathy for the killers, and the culture changes so so slowly....

I spent most of the time I read this book alternating between scaring my dog with loud, rasping screeches of outraged indignation that such stupidity is allowed to exist by this gawd person most of these boys, their families, and their communities profess belief in, and miserable, hopeless weeping of sympathetic pain at the agonies of loss, grief, and longing that the families, the parents, the loving friends of the murdered men will spend the rest of their lives experiencing, because the so-called "Holy Bible," actually full of holey babble, and its hellspawn idiot-friendly "christian values culture" don't like the idea of men having sex with each other.

Who cares what you think? Did someone ask you? Drag your mind out of the prurient gutter of thinking about what other people do in their bedrooms. It's often this fear of People Knowing that motivates a hate criminal to kill a gay victim...take the Matson and Mowder murder committed in 1999 by the Williams brothers. They were Living Faith Fellowship zealots who got too violent for even those yahoos. They ended up with an anti-semitic hit list, a list of synagogues to burn down...motivated in part by questions around their sexuality. Can't have people thinking we're fags...let's go kill the unclean scum infesting the world!

McConnell has written a book as horrifying and as necessary as In Cold Blood, and as likely to stand the test of time as a document of the consequences of sociopathic thinking. I can't recommend that you read it; but really, you should. Depressingly, most of you won't. It's not YOUR friend, brother, cousin, so why bother?

Because until people confront the horrible consequences of their smug, exclusionary language of "salvation" and the like, this won't be the last time a book like this is necessary.