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A sweet woman writing about ugly thingsKarin Slaughter's latest is 'A Faint Cold Fear'
By Adam Dunn
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Karin Slaughter is really a very nice person. Really. She speaks with a ladylike Southern accent, says things like "Heavens to B," and offers an entertaining and literate interview. Admittedly, you don't really get to know someone well in an interview, but there don't seem to be any cracked skulls or angry stalkers in her closet. But then you have her creations, the denizens of fictional Grant County, Georgia. They're grim folk who often aren't what they seem -- and some of them binge on horrific acts of sexual violence towards one another. "Blindsighted" (2001) featured "a bizarre rape and a crucifixion," noted People magazine. "Kisscut" (2002) had a child-pornography ring and network of pedophiles. And in "A Faint Cold Fear" (William Morrow), the new novel in her Grant County series, Slaughter appears to be moving towards progressively younger targets; indeed, one of them is a baby still in the womb. The horror of these crimes is typically viewed through Slaughter's three principals: Sara Linton, Grant's pediatrician (and pathologist as necessary); Sheriff Jeffrey Tolliver (Sara's ex-husband, now on his second lap with her), and Lena Adams, Slaughter's punching bag. Once the victim of a grotesque sexual assault (in "Blindsighted") Lena, once Jeffrey's colleague, has now been kicked off the force and is hanging on by being a campus cop at the Grant Institute of Technology, site of the current novel's first crime scene. Lena has always been a controversial character in Slaughter's books, whose struggle to come to terms with her ordeal has led her in a direction which some might label sadistic. The author herself insists this is not the case. "I think that characters who are nice all the time and who you sympathize with can get really boring," she says over the phone from Atlanta, where she is at work on her fourth novel, "Indelible." "Also ... there's a tendency with characters like Lena, who've been raped, to become over-sympathetic, to confer upon them some great personality trait or give them more dignity or something like that," she adds. "I think it's more interesting as a writer to make it a challenge for people to root for her in some instances." Detail upon detail
Slaughter returns again and again to the theme of damaged people's pasts, best summed up during one of Jeffrey's internal monologues: "Everybody had something horrible happen to them at one time or another in their life." Slaughter doesn't shy away from showing the uglier side of such damage -- lots and lots of gory forensic detail. In "Fear," after describing the more private aspects of a dead character by page 11, even squishier postmortem details follow -- which are then succeeded by Lena's gradual spin out of control, thanks to a mix of vodka and Vicodin, putting her directly in the path of Jeffrey's murder investigation. By then, readers will know they are in the midst of another Slaughter swamp, in which sexual violence lurks in every corner and each character's pain threshold is tested. Slaughter has had dark interests since childhood, when she read "Helter Skelter," the story of the Manson murders. (Later, she dated a mortician.) And she's always had an interest in medicine, she says, though never any training outside of a four-week course on the basics. "I like that medicine can offer clues to violence and what's happened to someone," she says, "that a murder ... doesn't stand alone, that there are clues that lead you toward how something was done and, eventually, why. I think a lot of people are curious about what makes people do what they do, and I guess my curiosity isn't hidden in any way." Slaughter's popularity has swelled since "Blindsighted" two years ago. "Faint Cold Fear" shows Slaughter contending well against competitors such as Patricia Cornwell, having been sold in a dozen foreign countries, as well as being a featured selection of the industry club group Bookspan. 'It's like seeing a really scary movie'Slaughter notes that the growing audience response to her books is from women, whether via the author's Web site or directly during the signings on her extensive tours; "there are more women readers, period," she observes. And as for the overall attraction of grisly crime novels, she puts it in the context of enjoying a good scare. "I think it's like seeing a really scary movie, and being entertained by it, and knowing when it's over you'll leave and you'll go back to your normal life," she says. "Even if you're frightened it's a certain form of escapism." And as for herself? Well, it's part curiosity, she says. And she enjoys it, too. "I read about violent things," she says. "I think what I get out of that is entertainment by learning about different things, and reading the genre and getting an understanding of motivations. But at the end of the day, it's still a book and I can walk away. "I can't speak for all women," she adds, "but for me, it's entertainment."
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