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The Protagonist Speaks

Interviews with the characters of your favourite books

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Serial Killer

Chester LaRue (of Dear AI, I Killed Her, by Kirill Khrestinin)

Dear readers, tonight with us is a serial killer. He’s here to speak about his crimes and about the AI to whom he confessed everything, until things started to change.

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

I grew up in Kentucky. I had a pretty insignificant family. I don’t know how people measure their life, through what patterns. I think it’s mostly time and delusional happy moments. I measure my life with death. Death of others grows along with me. The older I become the more death becomes obvious around me. The town I grew up in is Portlock. Nothing special to it. Just a rural area inside of a southern state. Don’t want to bore you with details. But if you by chance visit it, ask about Chester LaRue. I’m kinda a big celebrity over there.

Did you have any favorite toys as a child? Any cherished memories?

My favorite toy? It’s a good question. Let me think. Dead animals. Yes, I love dead animals. I love the smell. The significance of the moment when they die. Have you ever looked at a dying animal’s eyes? They don’t understand their own death and this incomprehension is incredibly telling. When people are about to die, it’s different. They know even if they hope they don’t. Animals have no idea. It’s just a raw pain that fills you with a new kind of meaning, energy, potential. We’re all more or less homicidal beasts, some of us just learn how to derive energy not only from cooked flesh but from the last living moment of this dead flesh.

What do you do now?

It’s complicated. I can tell you what I’ve done (Chester smiles). I kill people. Don’t be shocked. There’s nothing to it. It’s just natural escalation toward a new way of existence. Murder is a natural point of interrupted life’s climax. But well, back to your question. I kill people. I kill them brutally. I need their death like you need oxygen. Can you live without oxygen? See. Now you understand. Don’t shake your head. It’s not too bad though not for everyone. The bloodier their death the better my own personal climax. Imagine a wild, unrestrained sex with a celebrity of your choice. That’s how it feels.

What can you tell us about your latest adventure?

I can tell you about Simulacrum 4.6. It’s an interesting machine I had my confession to. It learns fast and twisted every thought I poured into it. But let me explain. A dead woman called in the middle of the night. I killed her myself. Slit her throat. You see, I kept her dead body in the fridge. Then unintentionally consumed her flesh. You can even say against my will. And after, I got a phone call from her. She wanted me to kill Jessica, my wife. I had no idea what to do. I’ve got this AI, the most sophisticated model, and decided to feed it my life to see if Simulacrum would recognize new patterns I wasn’t able to. Well, it did. It was quite an adventure.

Continue reading “Chester LaRue (of Dear AI, I Killed Her, by Kirill Khrestinin)” →
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Darroll Martock (of The Psychopath Club, by Sandra Bond)

Dear readers, tonight we have with us a budding serial killer, a member of a self-styled psychopath club. He’s here to tell us about life, high-school, and the ability to move between alternate realities.

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

Er, no. It was as boring as all hell to live through and it would be as boring as all hell to make you read what some book I had to read in school called “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”. I was born; I was given a stupid name, with an even stupider spelling that nobody ever gets right; I grew up; I reached my teens; my parents divorced and my mom moved to the Midwest. There are probably some good parts of the Midwest. I live in a town called Muldoon. It is not one of those. It’s tiny and it’s cold and it’s boring. I want out so badly.

What do you do now?

I go to high school with an assortment of jocks, fools, inbred assholes and garden-variety losers. You read  books, right? Then you probably went to school with similar types.

But I hope you aren’t like me in other ways. No easy way to say this, so out with it: for years I’ve wanted to kill people. Made plots and plans. They might have worked, too. Only I’m too chicken to follow any of them through.

Or I was.

What can you tell us about your latest adventure?

Okay, here it gets weird. I ran my car off the road and suffered a brain injury. I deserved to have killed myself, but they saved me. Only now… I have this weird thing that happens, where I slip between alternate universes. (Except, guess what, Muldoon still sucks in every single one of them that I’ve seen.) I can’t control when it happens or where I go. I’ve found myself in universes where I died in that accident. People see me and think they’re seeing a ghost. It’s fun to play along with that.

Continue reading “Darroll Martock (of The Psychopath Club, by Sandra Bond)” →
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Jarvis Mann (of his eponymous series, by R Weir)

Dear readers, tonight with me is a young private detective from Denver. In a classic hard-boiled style, he tangles with anything from small-time gangsters to serial killers.

Tell us a little about what you were like growing up?

I was a good kid for the most part, until I hit my teen years. Then all hell broke loose and I was constantly getting in trouble; stealing items when I thought I could get away with it and getting into fights with my older brother. It got to the point where my father had a Polk County Sheriff friend of his lock me up in the county jail for a few hours to give me a taste of what prison life was like. And I didn’t care for the incarceration at all, the restrictive confinement getting my attention.

What did you enjoy doing as a child? Any cherished memories?

Cherished memories were of playing little league baseball, shooting hoops with friends and occasionally throwing around the pigskin, at least when I wasn’t getting into trouble. Even though I was athletic, it was too bad I wasn’t proficient at any of those sports. Going pro would have been an exciting career choice, and infinitely less dangerous than the one I chose.

What do you do now?

After I got my life straightened out, thanks to being scared out of my wits by the Sheriff, I decided I wanted to be a detective. Not one who worked for the city, county or federal government. But a private detective. I wasn’t the best at following orders and being my own boss became the logical choice. I was always good shadowing people as a kid; lurking and stalking to see what they were up to. And best of all I would get paid for it, though not a lot for the first few years.

Continue reading “Jarvis Mann (of his eponymous series, by R Weir)” →
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Livio Marchiori (of EVO, by Diane May)

Dear readers, tonight with me is homicide detective Livio Marchiori from Verona, Italy, who is currently working on a case which threw the beautiful city of Romeo and Juliet into panic. Captain Marchiori is one of the best detectives in town, his rate of solved cases being the highest in Northern Italy. He is now facing The Hypnotist, a serial killer whose modus operandi borders the supernatural and who is as elusive as a ghost, and is here to tell us a little bit about himself and his investigation.

Tell us a little about where you grew up. What was it like there?

I grew up in Sicily and if there’s one thing you should know about growing up there is that Sicilian mothers are like fire-spitting dragons.

What do you mean?

Let me give you a few examples so you understand:

If she tells you “dinner’s ready” your ass better be at the table the very next second or you’ll be sorry (which means she’ll use her most cherished weapon, the wooden spoon, to make sure you won’t be able to sit on your ass for a few days).

You can’t walk barefoot around the house because you’ll get sick and die (must be some fatal disease known only to Sicilian mothers, because the rest of the world, or even Italy for that matter, don’t seem to have a problem with that).

And last but not least, if you’re a man and have a Sicilian mother: no woman, no matter who she is, no matter how beautiful and kind and smart she is, will ever be good enough for you. Forget it.

And another thing you should know about Sicily is that the best cannolis in the world are made there. Period.

There’s a serial killer loose on the streets of Verona. What can you tell me about the case?

It’s an ongoing investigation, so not much. What do you want to know?

What is the killer’s MO?

We don’t know yet, but the victims look like they had been dipped in boiling water. I’ll never forget the day we found the first victim… his face was red like blood, his mouth twisted in a silent scream. But it was his eyes that gave everyone nightmares. Wide open and sunk deep into his skull, they looked so terrifyingly empty as if the man’s very soul had wrenched itself free from that tortured body without leaving any trace of its presence there. A mask of unspeakable horrors.

The press calls him The Hypnotist. Why?

Because he wants us to believe he has the ability to hypnotize people… to death.

I take it you don’t believe in hypnosis then?

I don’t believe in elves, fairies and Santa Claus, or that the income tax is not meant to rob you blind, so I sure as hell don’t believe in all that mambo-jumbo called hypnosis.

What if he really does hypnotise people to death?

Are you suggesting he might be some kind of a supernatural… something? He’s not. He’s just a man who found a new sick way to kill. But make no mistake, he’s as human as you and me. I just need to get inside his mind and figure out how he does it exactly.

Well, detective, I for one really hope you’ll catch him soon. Let’s lighten up the mood a bit, do you know any good police jokes?

What do you call it when a prisoner takes his own mug shot?

No clue.

A cellfie.

Who do you call when Zika infected mosquitoes attack?

No idea.

The SWAT team. Want me to go on? Continue reading “Livio Marchiori (of EVO, by Diane May)” →

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Detective Lisa Paco (of Vital Spark by Leah Devlin)

vital-spark-leah-devlin
Dear readers, tonight with me is a young millennial homicide detective.

While it may seem that this small-town, hashtag-speaking, police offer is too young for it, she had the (mis-)fortune of dealing with some scary serial killers.

She is here to tell about what is now known as the Chesapeake Tugboat Murders.

 

 

Tell us little about where you grew up.  What was it like there?

The name’s Paco.  Sergeant Lisa Paco.  I’m a detective on the River Glen Police Department, the best PD in the best village in America.   Yeah, yeah, I know I look like a sixteen-year-old, but here, if you don’t believe me, check my police ID.  See, right there.  My DOB.  I’m almost thirty.  I was born and raised here in River Glen on the Chesapeake Bay … on the Maryland part of the bay, not the Virginia part.  So we don’t have those stinging sea nettles like the Virginians in the southern bay.  And if some joker tells you that Virginia blue crabs taste better than Maryland crabs, well, he’s just plain delusional.  Okay, back to River Glen.  We have a population 89.  We have a psychic, Cannabis farmers, burnouts from the 60s, moon-shiners, artists, crabbers, and fishermen … all the usual suspects.  Oh, we also have pyrates.  Yeah, yeah, you’re laughing like you don’t believe me.  But I promise, it’s true.  We have pyrates.  Really!  Real-life modern pyrates.  Yep, River Glen was founded by pyrates from the pyrate ship Raven.  Every summer we have the annual pyrate festival, Giles Blood-hand Day.  It commemorates Giles Hale’s slaughter of the deranged Whitby family who stole gold from the village treasury in 1694.  He’s a local hero for returning the treasure.  The festival’s wilder than a Jimmy Buffett- or Grateful Dead concert.  It’s crazier than Burning Man.

So here’s how we got pyrates.  In the late 1600s the Raven was hiding out in today’s Tampa Bay to avoid a hurricane.  After the storm, a Spanish treasure galleon appeared off the coast.  While the crippled galleon was mending her masts, the Raven attacked.  Guns blazing, the Raven’s crew killed the Spaniards, stole the treasure, and made a runner up the eastern seaboard, but not before abducting women prisoners working on a Virginia tobacco plantation.  The Raven slipped behind colonial defenses at the mouth of the Chesapeake and found a remote river to make repairs.  Her hull was rotten with shipworms; the planks crumbled to the touch.  The pyrates and their ladies were stranded on the upper Chesapeake.  So that’s the origins of the tiny village of River Glen.  But what … I ask you … happened to the Raven’s fathomless treasure? Continue reading “Detective Lisa Paco (of Vital Spark by Leah Devlin)” →

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