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| Akashic author, David McConnell alongside the cover of his new book, American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men |
Yet, when novelist David McConnell describes the method to
the madness of his new non-fiction book, American
Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among Men, it all makes perfect sense. The book, released from Benay client Akashic
Books just two weeks ago, is pretty much the non-fiction cousin of his previous
two novels, The Firebrat and The Silver Hearted. The subject matter is unanimous; very young,
typically foolish male protagonists who get tangled in their respective webs of
extreme bias and violence.
In 2003 McConnell brought The Firebrat to life through the tale of an aspiring, witty writer
who decides to out him and his subsequently outraged partner via short story. The firestorm that commences sends the young
man through a crash course of identity change that even his cocky intelligence
can’t best. In 2010 McConnell wove
another tale of crime and secrecy in the context of a wartime seaport. An old wino and a naïve sailor must band
together to hide the fortunes of a few shady investors, but their worldviews
clash. The drunkard’s power-trip and the
naif’s moral conscious clash with unexpected and rather unpleasant results.
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| The "Betrayal" issue of Granta, released, Spring 2013. |
“I wanted to do
something more urgent than wordsmithing in my mansard,” McConnell explains. “Violence
has always loomed large for me as an imaginary thing. But violence is also on
our cultural stage in a way it hasn’t been in earlier generations.”
Right you are,
Mr. McConnell.
With tragedies
like Sandy Hook happening right in Benay’s very own backyard, we know all too
well what he means. Though American Honor Killings does not deal
with quite that same situation, it stays along the same vein. The book recounts six cases in which young
men, harboring large amounts of seemingly irrational violence in them, have
lashed out and killed. The victims in
each and every one of these cases were all homosexual men. McConnell’s book specifically tries to crack
the logic behind these killings, delving deep into the psyche of unstable,
hate-ridden young men like his featured perpetrators.
McConnell writes
in his book about one specific murder that it was driven by “an authentic instance of hatred that can’t
be psychologized away – an idea of what’s right, not simple emotion, caused him
to kill.” When Patrick Ryan addresses this
statement in the Granta interview, asking why it is not a case of the famously coined term “gay panic,” McConnell explains that all of the killers he writes
of were reasoning individuals that used a “sober world view” throughout all of
their actions. “I’d say the crimes all
primarily involve a diseased sense of self,” says McConnell, “more than they
involve anything like a reaction to another, very different, human being.”
It is in this that McConnell’s own reasoning behind his book is
revealed. A writer can make a character
as fascinating or as dull as they would like, but in the end it is just a
character, and their perverse and violent world holds the sanctity of the fact
that, in the end, it is not real. It’s
only natural that David McConnell came to realize this and, having dealt with
such pressing subject matter, could no longer resist the temptation to dive
into it for real.
To view excerpts from American Honor Killings: Desire and Rage Among
Men please click here, where you can peruse sample pages and/or purchase
the paperback and digital editions.
Please feel free to visit the Akashic and Granta websites and browse the
additional upcoming features and titles that both publishers have to offer - they have much authorial talent, old and new, at your disposal.
- Colleen McClintock
