8. Blood Men

Book: Blood Men

Author: Paul Cleave

Number of pages: 329

What I’m watching: TV: How I Met Your Mother, Spiderman, Cadfael, The Colbert Report, Big Bang Theory, Downton Abbey, Twin Peaks, The Office, Kim Possible

Movies: Star Trek: Into Darkness, Project A, Die Hard, Run Fatboy Run, MST3K: I Was a Teenage Werewolf

What I’m playing: Skyrim, Bioshock, Fallout 3, God of War 3, Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Left 4 Dead, Bioshock: Infinite, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Deadly Premonition, Far Cry 3

 

            So I picked out the next six books for my blog, and decided a new approach to the reading order. The roll of a die.

I rolled a one. I read the beginning of Blood Men some time ago, when I made a half-assed attempt at reading the first 10^% of all my unread books to decide if they were worth keeping. Now, I’ve finally read the whole thing.

            Blood Men is set in Christchurch, New Zealand. All I knew about Christchurch before reading this book was a news story about a 2011 earthquake damaging the city’s iconic cathedral. If this fictional book is anything to go by, Christchurch is about as safe as Gotham.

They also do things in metric down there, which means 40 degrees is really hot and people measure in meters and kilos. Also, Christmas is during summer. And buildings are so many “storeys” high, not “stories.”

            WARNING! Minor spoilers. Edward, a 29-year-old son of a serial killer, is trying to lead a normal life, but the media speculates if he will turn serial murderer like his father. Edward has a wife and daughter, but early in the novel, his wife gets shot during a bank job. The plot centers on Edward seeking revenge on the bank robbers as he discovers that he does have an inclination toward killing. The narrative’s perspective switches between him and Schroder, a detective working the robbery case.

            Blood Men is a page-turner. It was thrilling and action-y. I also really enjoyed Paul Cleave’s writing style. He blends humor, action, and emotion very well. His depiction of Edward’s overwhelming grief moved me. It reminded me of Joker’s speech in The Killing Joke.

It also reminded me of Superman in the videogame Injustice: Gods Among Us.

In each case, Joker and Superman lost his wife and in his grief, went mad and turned to violence. Edward even thinks at one point, “my neighborhood is different – darker, everything gritty, it’s now the kind of place where only one bad day separates it between a suburbia and a war zone” (173; emphasis added). His view of the world altered after his one bad day, like the Joker. I try to imagine experiencing that same level of devastating loss, and I don’t know how I could cope. All in all, this book is depressing and violent.

            Edward turns to his imprisoned father, Jack, for help. Jack points toward paranoid schizophrenia as the cause for his murderous nature. Everyone in the book wonders whether Edward inherited his father’s mental disorder. This was where I had a bit of a problem with Blood Men. Let’s say that Jack does have paranoid schizophrenia. It is true that schizophrenia does have a strong biological influence. And, “research suggests that the paranoid type may have a stronger familial link than do people with the other types” (Durand and Barlow 479). So, there is a good chance that Edward has a predisposition for schizophrenia. However, family studies reveal that genetic inheritance of psychotic disorders is more complex:

All forms of schizophrenia (for example, catatonic and paranoid) were seen within the families. In other words, it does not appear that people inherit a predisposition for, say, paranoid schizophrenia. Instead, people may inherit a general predisposition for schizophrenia. More recent research confirms this observation and suggests that families that have a member with schizophrenia are at risk not just for schizophrenia alone or all psychological disorders; instead, there appears to be some familial risk for a spectrum of psychotic disorders related to schizophrenia. (Durand and Barlow 484)

Yes, there is a high likelihood that Edward would have schizophrenia. However, it would be a large assumption that Edward not only inherited the same type of schizophrenia, but also inherited the same murderous hallucinations of a voice telling him to kill in his symptoms. What I’m getting at is that I found the serial killer inheritance a bit far-fetched. However, Cleave throws a monkey wrench into those assumed works later in the novel. There are a few twists at the end. However, I guessed the twist that I think is supposed to fuel the last bit of the novel, so the ending kind of petered out for me. Nonetheless…

            Blood Men is a captivating read. Paul Cleave authored other thrillers, and if this one is anything to go by, the others are worth reading into.

 

Verdict (Is the book staying or going?): Staying.

 

Works Cited

Cleave, Paul. Blood Men. New York: Atria Paperback, 2010. Print.

Durand, Mark V. and David H. Barlow. Essentials of Abnormal Psychology. 5th ed.

Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2010. Print.