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Maybe someday
47
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
19/100Critics
75/100Scholars
Author:
Mark O'Connell
Publisher:
Doubleday
Date:
June 27, 2023
From the author of Notes From An Apocalypse, an account of one of the most scandalous murders in modern Irish history, at once a propulsive work of true crime and an act of literary subversion.
What The Reviewers Say
Doubt is the dominant key of Mark O’Connell’s exhilarating A Thread of Violence, a probing portrait of one of the most notorious murderers in recent Irish history.
It reads like a seance with the spirits of the still-living. Immaculately paced, A Thread of Violence generates a suspense that is formal and narratorial as much as it is a corollary of genre: we read it rapt with curiosity as to how the author will avoid the ethical pitfalls up ahead, how he can possibly pull this off without sensationalism or vulgarity. The moral murkiness of writing such a book at all is intrinsic to its architecture: there’s no getting around that, by fixing his attention on a double murderer, the prestigious writer effectively signs an endorsement on the jacket cover of Malcolm Macarthur’s life, declaring it darkly riveting, profound in its moral implications.
The unbelievability is probably most resonant. The cliche that truth is stranger than fiction hangs over this story.
That very human need to understand growls in the background of every page, drives O’Connell, fuels, alongside crass voyeurism, the true-crime boom. There’s an instinct to search for reasons. Not excuses, necessarily, but something we can all point to by way of explanation, reassuring ourselves that we’ve identified the cause of the horror.
