The pervert’s point of view, a scandal when admitted into memoir, has always been fiction’s domain. It is the novelist’s vocation, in fact his privilege, to go as deeply as he can into his darkest dreams. From Satan in Paradise Lost to Dracula to Lou Ford in The Killer Inside Me to Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, the novelist can make the depraved, egomaniacal, unsympathetic narrator palatable, and even enjoyable. The monster’s opining, the murderer’s methodology, the cannibal’s recipe for human pancakes can all be wonderful when the reader knows nothing is true. Or when the truth is hidden behind the make believe. “That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth,” wrote Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried.
