This excerpt —adapted from A Thread of Violence: A Story of Truth, Invention and Murder by Mark O’Connell, published by Granta on 6 July—shows O’Connell’s attempts to uncover the psychology behind two brutal murders. In doing so, he begins to question his own role as the reporter of the story. Beautifully written and a real mind-twister.
He gave me a look of almost cartoonish wariness; he knew that I knew who he was. What he could not have known was that my reaction was not just to seeing a famous murderer walking around campus, but to encountering a character from a novel in the realm of supposed reality. It was as though the fabric separating fact from fiction had been torn.
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