A spine–chilling first novel loosely based on the author's real–life relationship with a convicted murderer, An Absolute Gentleman delves, with subtlety and tremendous psychological insight, into a serial killer's mind.Meet Arthur Bloom: charming guy, small–town English professor, struggling writer, and occasional murderer. In this beautifully articulated debut novel, R. M. Kinder brilliantly channels Arthur's voice to reveal the aberrant thought processes of a surprisingly sympathetic serial killer. Horror arises as it does in real life, in brief hints and disclosures that gradually reveal the complex nature of an all–too–human narrator.

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zlib/Crime, Thrillers & Mystery/Thrillers/Kinder, R M/An Absolute Gentleman_4002349.pdf

Kinder Kinder

R. M. Kinder

Counterpoint ; Turnaround [distributor

Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint

Basic Civitas Books

United States, United States of America

Berkeley, CA, California, 2007

Washington, D.C., London, 2008

October 1, 2007

PT, 2007

lg_fict_id_1283434

topic: College teachers; Serial murderers

Type: 英文图书

Bookmarks:
1. (p1) CHAPTER 1
2. (p2) CHAPTER 2
3. (p3) CHAPTER 3
4. (p4) CHAPTER 4
5. (p5) CHAPTER 5
6. (p6) CHAPTER 6
7. (p7) CHAPTER 7
8. (p8) CHAPTER 8
9. (p9) CHAPTER 9
10. (p10) CHAPTER 10
11. (p11) CHAPTER 11
12. (p12) CHAPTER 12
13. (p13) CHAPTER 13
14. (p14) CHAPTER 14
15. (p15) CHAPTER 15
16. (p16) CHAPTER 16
17. (p17) CHAPTER 17
18. (p18) CHAPTER 18
19. (p19) CHAPTER 19
20. (p20) CHAPTER 20
21. (p21) CHAPTER 21
22. (p22) CHAPTER 22
23. (p23) CHAPTER 23
24. (p24) CHAPTER 24
25. (p25) CHAPTER 25
26. (p26) CHAPTER 26
27. (p27) CHAPTER 27
28. (p28) AFTERWORD

theme: College teachers; Serial murderers

In a chilling afterword, Kinder (*A Near-Perfect Gift*, 2005, etc.) says she intended to write about Robert Weeks, whom she actually identified “from an episode of Unsolved Mysteries” and whom her ex-husband, a homicide detective, arrested.
The fictional Arthur Blume, whose persona she inhabits instead, has many standard serial-killer traits. He trained by abusing animals. He had an inventively cruel, sporadically psychotic mother, alternately nurturing and withholding of love and (despite her wealth) financial support. Blume, now 50, has gotten a job at a second-rate university in Mason, Mo. His initially innocuous-seeming ruminations on departmental politics alternate with memories of his childhood and adolescence on his mother’s farm in Georgia. Occasionally, always in detached, offhand fashion, he mentions women that, years after the alleged slight, he had to dispatch because they had offended, in some trivial way, another male.
Blume is immediately attuned to female turmoil in the English department. Queen-bee secretary Margaret has it in for Nada, an elderly woman who works as an underpaid factotum, den mother and gofer to the professors, yearning for mentorship. (Nada’s written stacks of unpublished and mostly unread manuscripts—fiction, songs and poetry.) Grace, a faculty colleague, comes on to Blume as does Justinia, a student and part-time stripper. Grace hopes to enlist him as a fellow bourgeois bohemian, but he’s an isolate who prefers his Victoriana-cozy apartment, where he obsessively massages the long-overdue successor to his “one-hit-wonder” first novel. Nada, although pestering him for validation (she crashes his advanced-writing seminar) is the closest thing he has to a true friend, until one icy day during spring break when the beast within must be fed. Blume’s personality disorder makes him a prissy, fastidious monster, critical of other serial killers’ cruder methods, but a monster nonetheless. ([Kirkus Reviews][1])
[1]: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/rm-kinder/an-absolute-gentleman/

A spine-chilling first novel loosely based on the author's real-life relationship with a convicted murderer, An Absolute Gentleman delves, with subtlety and tremendous psychological insight, into a serial killer's mind. Meet Arthur charming guy, small-town English professor, struggling writer, and occasional murderer. In this beautifully articulated debut novel, R. M. Kinder brilliantly channels Arthur's voice to reveal the aberrant thought processes of a surprisingly sympathetic serial killer. Horror arises as it does in real life, in brief hints and disclosures that gradually reveal the complex nature of an all-too-human narrator.

Meet Arthur Blume : Charming Guy, Small-town English Professor, Struggling Writer, And Occasional Murderer. R.m. Kinder.

2015-12-07