Social Media Nourishes Murderous Misogyny

If you haven't noticed, there's a disturbing new trend of misogyny-inspired murder in the headlines. It started when Elliot Rodger killed six people and injured 14 others before killing himself in Isla Vista, CA, in 2014, leaving a manifesto about his "Incel" motivations. After Rodger introduced the world to a dark Internet subculture, his fellow "Incels" quickly awarded him iconic status. There followed other Incel-inspired mass killings such as Chris Harper-Mercer's 2015 rampage at Umpqua Community College in Oregon that killed nine and injured eight; Alek Minassian's 2018 Toronto massacre in which he used his van to kill 10 and injure 14; and Scott Beierle's Hot Yoga Studio attack in Tallahassee, FL, that left two women dead and injured four women and a man. Even the infamous Parkland killer, Nikolas Cruz, who gunned down 17 people and injured 17 more at Stoneman Douglas High School, posted online that "Elliot Rodger will not be forgotten." What is this Incel madness? Incel is short for "involuntary celibate," and these women-hating souls (almost exclusively white male heterosexuals) believe they are entitled to sex yet are being denied by women and society. They gather in Internet forums (notably Reddit) of shared misery but go beyond commiserating with each other over not being able to get a date. Incels glorify violence against sexually active women, harassment of women, and catfishing of women. Some warp concepts such as biological determinism, evolutionary psychology, and female hypergamy (that 80% of women desire only the top 20% of most attractive men) to justify their anger. But mostly they talk about their looks, penis size, loneliness, suicide, sex robots, rape, etc. And they cheer men who take revenge for sexual deprivation by killing people. This social media-enabled misogyny should be driving more national concern. The Incel subculture is just beginning to catch the notice of mystery authors--for example Lori A. Witt's 2018 debut Incel about a male-female detective team investigating a series of murders connected to Incel Internet forums. Meanwhile, though free speech lets Incels rant, I would urge media, law enforcement, legislators, and social media platforms to raise the alarm and focus on monitoring and intervention before the death toll goes higher. For Witt's novel, see https://www.amazon.com/Incel-Walker-Arruda-Book-1-ebook/dp/B07GLXGC45

Winter Can Be a Deadly Season

While crime generally proliferates as the temperature climbs, statistically peaking in summer, homicide is a less seasonal crop, a year-round blight on the human condition. Certainly, mystery authors find winter's bleak landscapes and frozen isolation apt settings for murder. And winter does have its own emotionally toxic aspects, such as seasonal affective disorder (SAD) depression and cabin fever, a very real condition per scientists. The isolation, lack of socialization and boredom when bad weather traps people indoors alone or with the same faces can express itself as cabin fever's irritability, restlessness, excessive sleepiness and negative feelings. Documented cases among Arctic and Antarctic scientists and explorers have included attacking each other with hammers, poisoning a colleague to death, and burning a research station to the ground, per a recent Popular Science article. Mystery and thriller authors have used frigid settings for some outstandingly chilly novels, and any list would have to start with Stephen King's The Shining, in which Jack Torrance goes murderously mad as caretaker of a creepy, snow-bound hotel. The Scandinavians naturally dominate wintertime mysteries. Keep hot cocoa handy to offset the chill of Blood on Snow by Jo Nesbo, writer of the Harry Hole detective series, about a surprisingly sympathetic contract killer; Faceless Killers by Henning Mankell, which launched the famed Kurt Wallander series with gruesome murders in a cold, remote farmhouse; and Peter Hoeg's Smilla's Sense of Snow about exotic Smilla's obsessive tracking of murder clues and secrets from Copenhagen to her icy origins in Greenland. Of course, Russia's snowy steppes and oppressive society are perfect for deadly doings, and Martin Cruz Smith's classic Gorky Park is a good example; Soviet detective Arkady Renko investigates three mutilated, frozen corpses in Gorky Park, a Moscow amusement park, and ends up battling both the KGB and ruthless Americans. In the snowy Pyrenees, acclaimed French author Bernard Minier has crafted a haunting tale with The Frozen Dead, in which a charismatic city cop must make connections between a series of gruesome murders, strange doings at an insane asylum, and a tale of madness and revenge from the past. Of course, England has a raft of wintry mysteries from the likes of Agatha Christie and P.D. James, but more recently there's Robert Bryndza's The Girl in the Ice, introducing Detective Erika Foster as she begins to investigate the discovery of a beautiful young socialite's body beneath ice in a South London park--and soon finds the trail of a serial killer. For mysteries debuting this winter, whether they feature frigid temperatures or not, see https://www.bookish.com/articles/winter-2019-must-read-mysteries-thrillers/

Reading Resolution: Exploring Women Writers

Time to make those 2019 reading resolutions! I've decided that one of my resolutions will be a conscious effort to read fiction by and about women. After all, 2019 is seeing a record 102 women sworn into House, California Rep. Nancy Pelosi making history by returning as House Speaker, another Women's March organizing for Jan. 19, and the #MeToo movement bearing fruit as at least 11 states pass new protections against workplace harassment. I'll start with women authors receiving 2018 fiction awards. For example, the 2018 Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award went to Attica Locke for Bluebird, Bluebird, about an explosive intersection of love, race, and justice in East Texas. The 2018 Man-Booker International Prize honored Olga Tokarczuk for Flights, which interweaves haunting characters and stories to create a meditation on what it means to be a traveler in both space and time. Kamila Shamsie won the 2018 Women's Prize for Fiction for her Home Fire, a reworking of Sophocles' Greek tragedy Antigone. Joan Silber won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction last year for Improvement, a novel about a young single mother living in New York, her eccentric aunt, and unexpected implications of their decisions. In Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend, winner of the National Book Award, the unnamed protagonist loses her longtime best friend and fellow writer to suicide and finds herself responsible for his Great Dane, bonding with the dog to deal with grief. The Reading Women podcast named All the Names They Used for God by Anjali Sachdeva, a genre-busting collection of stories about struggles with fate, as its 2018 fiction winner. For more ideas on women-oriented reading, try the "2019 Reading Women Challenge" at https://www.readingwomenpodcast.com/reading-women-challeng…/