Every artist draws something special from their work. This something is unsurpassed by anything else in the artist’s life, be it a day job, relationships, joy from food or any other basic pleasure that, for non-artists, is the highest point in their lives.
For a killer, the most fulfilling thing is murder. Obliterating another person’s life, watching a victim take the last breath, witnessing the moment when life leaves a body and death takes over – that is the ultimate fulfilment a killer craves. Without it, a killer doesn’t have a reason to live. I find a certain irony in it.
The Yorkshire Slasher doesn’t consider themselves a killer. They think of themselves as an artist. Death, in their eyes, is beautiful and magnetic. A murder scene is a piece of art – an exquisite painting. And their knife is a brush.
“When Darkness Falls” by Kathleen Harryman opens with a blood-chilling, horrifying scene of a brutal murder. The author takes readers on a journey through a maze of a psychopath’s warped mind. We see the act of violence from the killer’s perspective. Through Yorkshire Slasher’s eyes, we watch the victim go through the stages of disbelief, fear, and succumbing first psychologically and then physically to their inevitable demise. The author weaves the tale so masterfully that I actually started to feel the allure and beauty of blood when it leaves the confines of a body. Still, terror and sympathy for the victims remained predominant until the end of the book.
Tracy Bennett lives an unassuming life in York, England. She works in a department store selling make-up. Her colleagues are also her best friends. Her past is tainted by trauma, but it seems she has gotten over it. But is it really so? Or have those events scarred her deeper than anyone could imagine?
“When Darkness Falls” isn’t for the faint-hearted. It doesn’t paint a slightly disturbing picture of a romanticised murderer with a noble heart and a principle code. The story is a harsh account of how a psychopath sees life and acts in it. A psychopath doesn’t have mercy. They don’t see other people as living beings with dreams, families, aspirations for the future. For them, people are vessels carrying the key to the moments of ultimate pleasure to which psychopaths consider themselves entitled. After reading this book, I realised that the differences between ‘common’ people and psychopaths are much wider than we believe. Psychopaths can’t stop in pursuing their dark desires because they are confident the world owes them their satisfaction. While regular people, with all the sections in their brain active and functioning, besides sympathy and the ability to love and care about others, have a kind of stop lever. This stop lever automatically gets pressed when we want something we know isn’t right or can hurt others.
The ending was intriguing, and I’ll definitely read the next book in the series.
Eve's Book Diary 