Hidden In Plain Sight: Casey Hill Returns With Another Reilly Steel Tale

HIDDEN (Simon and Schuster) is the third offering from the husband-and-wife / wife-and-husband partnership of Casey Hill, following on from TABOO (2011) and TORN (2012), the first of which was shortlisted for the crime fiction category of the Irish Book Awards in 2011. All three feature forensic investigator Reilly Steel, a Quantico-trained pro negotiating Dublin’s mean streets, and all three are very firmly in the serial killer sub-genre. To wit:

A Fallen Angel. A Devil on the Loose. When a young girl is discovered dead on an isolated Irish country road, it seems at first glance to be a simple hit and run. Then the cops see the tattoo on her back - a pair of beautifully wrought angel wings that lend the victim a sense of ethereal innocence. Forensic investigator Reilly Steel is soon on the scene and her highly tuned sixth sense tells her there is more to this case than a straightforward murder. But with almost zero evidence and no way to trace the girl's origin, Reilly and the police are at a loss. Then the angel tattoo is traced to other children - both dead and alive - who are similarly marked, and Reilly starts to suspect they have all been abducted by the same person. But why? And will Reilly get to the bottom of the mystery and uncover what links these children together before tragedy strikes again?

  The TV rights to the Reilly Steel series have been optioned by a UK production company, by the way, so expect to see her coming to a screen near you very soon. For more on Reilly Steel and Casey Hill, clickety-click here …

Review: TORN by Casey Hill

Casey Hill is the pseudonym of the wife-and-husband writing team, Melissa and Kevin Hill; Melissa Hill is a best-selling author of women’s fiction. Their first novel was TABOO (2011).
  The Quantico-trained, Dublin-based Californian forensic investigator Reilly Steel of the fictional Garda Forensic Unit (GFU) returns for her second outing in Casey Hill’s second novel, TORN (Simon & Schuster), in which a particularly perverse serial killer is dispatching his victims in a series of diabolical murders that have their roots in one of the great works of world literature - Dante’s Comedy, and in particular the Inferno.
  The first victim, for example, is found inside a septic tank, where he has drowned in a rather horrible fashion. He is, perhaps not coincidentally, a journalist …
  As more corpses appear, Reilly Steel and her team, in tandem with Garda detectives Chris Delaney and Pete Kennedy, realise that despite the apparent random nature of the killings, a pattern is emerging.
  On the face of it, it’s not a particularly plausible plot, but despite the cutting-edge technology on display here - at one point Reilly uses an iSPI (Investigative Scene Processing Integration) device to help her reconstruct crime scenes - Casey Hill is in the business of creating old-fashioned mystery stories that have much more in common with the puzzle-solving games of yore than they have with the gritty realists of contemporary crime fiction. In this context, it’s less important to construct an ironclad plot than it is to create for the reader an intriguing puzzle which can be solved by the reading of various clues.
  Indeed, the reader is encouraged to have some fun acknowledging the tropes of the serial killer puzzler. “Are you really surprised that he didn’t take you straight to his home territory so early in the game?” asks a character of Reilly in the latter stages. The authors even allow Reilly a tongue-in-cheek run-through of the serial killer genre’s conventions as she comments aloud on the case in hand: “Meticulously planned murders,” she observes, “no effort too great, lots of research on the victims needed, the method of dispatch excessive, grotesque even …”
  That said, and while accepting that TORN leans heavily towards the escapist end of the crime / mystery spectrum, an existential quality emerges as the story thunders towards its finale. What is the point? Reilly & Co ask themselves. Isn’t catching a killer once the murders are already committed an exercise in stable-door bolting? And who can guarantee the investigators, who put their lives on the line, that the judicial system will vindicate their efforts and not botch the prosecution?
  Given the conservative nature of the crime / mystery novel, this is a quiet but impressively radical departure. There’s little of the usual cant about justice and redemption on show here; in TORN, the punishment very aptly fits the crime. In the guise of ostensibly escapist mystery fiction, Casey Hill asks a valid but rarely asked question: do readers have the stomach for a truly gritty reality, in which some crimes, no matter how terrible, simply go unpunished? - Declan Burke

The Second Life Of Reilly

Last year’s TABOO, from husband-and-wife writing partnership Casey Hill, dragged Irish crime fiction into the bright ‘n’ shiny CSI age, as their Quantico-trained investigator Reilly Steel arrived in Dublin to head up a brand new forensics office and hunt down a nefarious serial killer. A UK production team is currently beavering away to bring Reilly to a TV screen near you; in the meantime Casey Hill’s sophomore offering, TORN (Simon & Schuster), will be hitting the shelves in March. Quoth the blurb elves:

When an ex-cop is found frozen to death in a bath of ice at a disused meatpacking plant, the Dublin police conclude it may be one of the man’s past collars taking revenge. Shortly afterwards, a tabloid journalist is found drowned in his own septic tank, buried up to the neck in excrement. The reporter had many enemies, but why would someone go to such elaborate lengths to exact revenge? Both crime scenes are a forensic investigator’s worst nightmare. The locations and victims yield little in the way of usable evidence, and Reilly Steel quickly discovers that she may be dealing with a killer - or killers - who know all about crime scene investigation. The police are just as frustrated by the crimes’ impenetrable nature, and it’s only when a third murder occurs - equally graphic and elaborate in its execution - that the police and Reilly begin to wonder if the same person might be responsible. And they soon discover that this particular killer is using a very specific blueprint for his crimes. Who is the killer’s next victim? And what’s his endgame?

  Bodies packed in ice in meatpacking plants? Journos drowning in septic tanks full of excrement? Outsiders coming in to clear up our mess? Is TORN an extended metaphor for how ripped apart is Irish society in these straitened times? Or is it just good, clean serial-killing fun? YOU decide.

CaSI: Dublin

I mentioned last week that Benny Blanco, aka Benjamin Black, aka John Banville, will see his Quirke novels adapted for a TV series in the UK, and lo! Hardly had the dust settled than another TV series has been announced for an Irish crime writer, or more accurately the pair of Irish crime writers known as CaSI, oops, Casey Hill. Quoth the PR elves:

TV rights to TABOO, the debut thriller by Irish bestselling author Melissa Hill and husband Kevin, have this week been snapped up by a leading UK production company.
  The husband and wife team (who write under the pseudonym Casey Hill) have signed a lucrative TV deal with Ecosse Films, the production company behind hit UK TV shows such as ‘Mistresses’, ‘He Kills Coppers’, ‘Raw’ and films ‘Brideshead Revisited’ and the Anne Hathaway-starred ‘Becoming Jane’.
  Ecosse will produce a CSI-style TV series based on Reilly Steel, the feisty American forensic investigator from TABOO, who comes to Dublin to work alongside the Gardai in order to track down a twisted serial killer who is dispatching citizens at a frightening rate. The book is said to be along the lines of Patricia Cornwell’s popular Kay Scarpetta series, and is the first in a planned series of novels featuring Reilly Steel.
  It is another major coup for the writing pair, who last year secured a six-figure pre-empt from major UK publisher Simon & Schuster for their debut novel, and went on to achieve further translation deals in a string of international territories. Upon its release in Ireland earlier this year, TABOO stormed straight into the bestseller list at No 2. It has just hit the shelves in the UK, and with the story now poised to hit TV screens the book’s popularity is set to soar.

  Hearty congrats to all concerned, especially as even a solidly performing TV series could well translate into millions of potential readers. Given that TABOO and its mooted sequels are set in Dublin, the news should prove a welcome boost to the domestic filmmaking market too.
  Melissa Hill, of course, is already a bestselling author of women’s fiction, and her current tome, SOMETHING FROM TIFFANY’S, is still selling gangbusters after parachuting straight in at No 1 in the Irish fiction charts earlier this summer.
  So there you have it. I never thought I’d write a post containing the words ‘Melissa Hill’, ‘Brideshead Revisited’, ‘John Banville’ and ‘Something From Tiffany’s’ and ‘He Kills Coppers’, but it’s mutating into a funny ol’ world, this Irish crime writing lark …

Paint It Black

The Big Question: why do authors, when choosing a nom-de-plume as an Irish crime writer, go for Black? Ingrid Black, Benjamin Black, Sean Black … Why not Green? I’d pay good money to read the ‘entertainments’ of an Aloysius Greene.
  Anyhoo, Sean Black - who is about as Irish as haggis, but a good bloke with it; and anyway, he lives here - publishes the third in the Ryan Lock series of thrillers this August, GRIDLOCK, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Adult movie actress, Raven Lane, is one of the most lusted after women in America, with millions of fans to prove it. But when a headless corpse turns up in the trunk of her car, she realises that fame carries a terrible price. Fearing for her life, and with the LAPD seemingly unable to protect her, Raven turns to elite bodyguard, Ryan Lock for help. Lock stops bad things happening to good people, but can he stop the tidal wave of violence now threatening the city of Los Angeles as Raven’s predator targets - and kills - those closest to her? As events spiral out of control, Lock is drawn into a dangerous world where money rules, where sex is a commodity to be bought and sold, and where no one can be trusted, least of all his beautiful new client. But what he cannot know is the terrifying price he’s about to pay - just for getting involved ...

  Hmmm. Already this year we’ve had Casey Hill’s TABOO, which features a protagonist called Reilly Steel, which isn’t that far removed from real-life ‘adult movie actress’ Reilly Steele; and now Sean Black’s GRIDLOCK stars ‘adult movie actress’ Raven Lane. Is there a trend developing here? And can I jump the bandwagon early, thus belatedly justifying my lifetime’s research of the ‘adult movie’ industry? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell …

On Putting The ‘Boo!’ Into TABOO

I had an article on female crime writers published in the Irish Times last week, which gloried in the title ‘Why Women Writers Rule the Crime-Ridden Night’. Oooh, spooky. Anyway, it kicked off like thusly …

Casey Hill is a marketing dream. TABOO, the debut novel, presses all the commercial buttons: it’s a police procedural featuring a feisty young woman, the forensic investigator Reilly Steel, who travels from her native California to the mean streets of Dublin only to find herself the target of a resourceful serial killer, the tale given a frisson of sexual tension via Reilly’s relationship with Garda Detective Chris Delaney.
  So far, so good, but Casey Hill has more to offer. ‘Casey Hill’ is the open pseudonym of husband-and-wife writing partnership Kevin and Melissa Hill. Young, attractive and media-friendly, the pair have an unusually strong publishing platform for debutants, given that Melissa Hill is the (self-described) author of eight best-selling chick-lit novels.
  So what’s a chick-lit author doing dirtying her hands with crime fiction gore?
  The easy answer to that question is, ‘Capitalising on her established audience.’ That may sound perverse, given that the perceived wisdom of commercial publishing is that when it comes to genre fiction, women prefer books that feature pink sparkly covers and kitten heels, whereas men tend to go for mayhem and murder.
  The perceived wisdom couldn’t be further from the truth …

  To get to the truth, or at least my version of it, just clickety-click here …
  If you can’t be bothered doing that - and really, who could blame you? - you can find an extract from TABOO here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Casey Hill

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. There has never been a more perfect rendering of a psychopath than Harris’s brilliant Hannibal Lecter.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Jeffery Deaver’s Lincoln Rhyme - he’s super-smart, very cool and never has any problems getting a parking space in Manhattan.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
Katie Price aka Jordan - she has the best story ideas. Nah, no such thing as guilt when it comes to reading anything.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Bringing our daughter Carrie into a book shop and seeing TABOO on the shelves for the first time. She was only nine months old but think she looked quite impressed.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Difficult question but would have to go with John Connolly’s THE WHITE ROAD, though his brilliant writing almost transcends genre.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Casey Hill’s TABOO, of course. Failing that, any one of John Connolly’s would transfer well to the big screen if the director could properly capture the supernatural elements.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Best: Being able to set your own hours and work from anywhere. Worst: Being able to set your own hours and work from anywhere.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Reilly Steel hunts down another gruesome murderer using street smarts and shiny new forensic equipment.

Who are you reading right now?
Chuffed to have been offered a sneak preview of Declan Burke’s fab new tome ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which is actually very cool indeed.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
First, I’d beg him to let me write just once more before choosing to read. Then I’d ask Himself for an exclusive interview about his life story, write about it, then read away to my heart’s content on the Caribbean island I bought with the royalties.

Casey Hill’s TABOO is published by Simon & Schuster.

Hill, Thrills And Bellyaches

Some days it seems like I’m always the last to know, etc. Further proof that we’re staring into the abyss of an economic apocalypse, if any were needed, comes with the news that best-selling Irish chick-lit author, Melissa Hill, has turned her hand to writing thrillers. To wit:

  Bestselling Irish chick-lit author Melissa Hill has switched to thriller writing.
  A new book she has co-written with her businessman husband Kevin was bought this week for a six-figure sum by Simon & Schuster in the UK and big money deals have also been done for other countries.
  The forensic crime thriller is called TABOO and represents a major literary crossover for Melissa whose eight chick-lit novels to date have all been bestsellers.
  TABOO was snapped up by publishers in several countries within 24 hours of being offered by Hill’s agent. It’s the first in a series she and Kevin will be penning together under the name Casey Hill. - John Spain, Irish Independent

  So wot's it all abaht, then? Quoth Irish Publishing News:

TABOO, the first of a six-figure, two book deal, will be released in Spring 2011 and will feature the character Riley Steel – a Quantico trained forensic investigator who comes to Dublin to head up the GFU, a new state-of-the-art Irish crime lab.

  Riley Steel, eh? In a way it’s almost too neat for words. Chick lit celebrated the shopping-and-fucking excess of the Celtic Tiger, most of it the literary equivalent of shiny, tacky bling. Now that the party’s over, and everyone’s wondering who paid for it on the never-never, crime fiction steps in to investigate.
  Hey, maybe Amanda Brunker will slip a mickey finn into her next Champagne novel.
  So: am I going to bellyache about the chick-lit brigade stomping all over the crime scene in their six-inch stilettos? Nope. Could. Not. Be. Arsed. The best of luck to Melissa with her new venture, and here’s hoping it’s not a one-way street. I, for one, would pay big bucks to read Gene Kerrigan’s chick-lit tale of a former Dublin gangster who has gone all Gok Wan and hit the runways of Paris and Rome modelling Armani briefs, but only as a front for his undercover role as a globe-trotting hitman. Gene? You know it makes sense …

Taboo Or Not Taboo, That Is The Question

UNCAGE ME is the follow-up to 2007’s EXPLETIVE DELETED, being a collection of short stories about taboos and the breaking thereof, and edited by the ultra-glam Jen Jordan (right). Among the very fine writers contributing are Scott Phillips, Allan Guthrie, J.D. Rhoades, Simon Kernick, Patrick Bagley, Tim Maleeny, Nick Stone, Martyn Waites and Maxim Jakubowski. It also features a thoughtful piece by John Connolly in its introduction, in which JC muses at length about the history and nature of transgression. To wit:

To paraphrase Cole Porter, in olden days a glimpse of stocking might have been considered shocking, but now, quite frankly, almost anything goes. I say ‘almost’ because, of course, Porter was wrong to conclude that there were no longer any limits on behaviour, although we can forgive him because he was less interested in making an irrefutable statement than in fitting words to a good tune. It’s probably asking a lot to expect him to be more than broadly socially and philosophically accurate as well.
  Boundaries and limits - legal, moral, national, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and physical - still exist, but it is a facet of the modern (or even post-modern) world that they are being challenged at an ever accelerating rate. But those challenges are not entirely negative in their connotations; rather, they can be seen as an effort to establish the nature and extent of those limitations. Thus, acts of transgression should not be viewed as destructive by nature. To approach them in this way is to misunderstand them, for their relationship to the society that gives rise to them is far more complex than might at first appear.
  The word ‘transgression’ enters the English language for the first time in the 16th century, but it comes weighted with negative spiritual meaning. Perhaps the first great act of transgression is the decision by Adam and Eve to eat forbidden fruit, thereby violating their pact with God. Yet with this act comes a certain liberation, albeit at considerable cost. Admittedly, the Church fathers did not see it in this way, and so transgression becomes associated with evil, with St John telling us that ‘Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God’ (2 John 9).
(It is worth noting, in passing, that Eve bears the primary burden for disobeying God’s will, and subsequently tempting her partner. Here, the seeds are sown for an abiding distrust of women, and the demonic associations that came to be made with feminine qualities. Thus it was that the female body, by the time of the Renaissance, was the subject of constant surveillance, and was regarded as, in a way, grotesque. It was a body which potentially exceeded any boundary or limit, and was thus regarded as transgressive by its very nature. Something of this sense of the threat posed by the feminine mystique survives in the femmes fatales of film noir, who are, in their way, all descendants of the lady Eve.)
  As time progresses, though, some of those earlier spiritual connotations fall away, and ‘to transgress’ becomes more general in its meaning, covering any kind of deviation from the norm, as well as non-physical acts of aggression against the person. Finally, it begins to refer to the crossing of boundaries, whether moral, legal, or, indeed, artistic and aesthetic, which is where we should perhaps locate it for the purposes of this volume.
  In fact, creative and artistic endeavours provide an apt proving ground for notions of transgression. As the writer bell hooks puts it: ‘Art, and most especially painting, was for me a realm where every imposed boundary could be transgressed.’
  The use of the word ‘imposed’ raises an interesting question. Are constraints entirely imposed from the outside? If we transgress, do we do so purely against some external authority, whether human or divine? I would argue that we do not, that there is a personal element in our responses to moral imperatives, an element of subjectivity that brings with it a desire to transgress, even a necessity to do so. Societies find a way to channel and express this desire: mythologies are one such channel, acts of mockery another, or what Bakhtin described as ‘the laughter of the carnival’. Such laughter is collective, universal, and ambivalent, but it is not destructive, and here is where our relationship with the notion of transgression becomes really interesting.
Transgression is both an act of affirmation and denial. It recognizes the existence of a certain limitations or boundaries, even as it seeks to overstep those marks. In fact, it requires the continued existence of such boundaries for its effect. If the act of transgression shatters the boundary entirely, then what is left? As St Paul put it, ‘Where no law is, there is no transgression’ (Romans 4:15).
  Transgression is not the same as disorder. It does not invite chaos. Even Georges Bataille, the 20th-century writer whose work is perhaps most closely associated with the notion of the transgressive, for whom erotic transgression was the archetype, the sine qua non, of all transgression (albeit linked, by violence, to death), understood the necessity of suspending, rather than removing, sexual constraints. A taboo might be violated, but not terminated. ‘The sacred world’, wrote Bataille, ‘depends on limited acts of transgression.’
  One might argue, then, that transgression is not in itself necessarily subversive. It seeks to question boundaries and limitations, not destroy them. It is not an overt challenge to the status quo; it is instead an interrogation, a questioning. In that sense, it is complicit in that which it critiques, but it is not blindly accepting of it. Instead, it recognizes that every limitation contains within it the possibility of its own fracture. The instruction to obey carries with it the potential for disobedience. In cultural terms, it prevents stagnation by forcing us constantly to reassess the rules governing our society, while at the same time reaffirming the necessity of those rules. It may lead to a reordering, but not to the absence of order at all.
  Still, the tension between what may be perceived by one side as legitimate questioning that may possibly lead to change, or even just a different perspective, and by another as a threat to the established order, goes some way towards explaining why the relationship between art and the law is so fractious. It’s worth recalling the furore that initially greeted Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain when it was staged by the National Theatre in London in 1980. Intended, in part, as a commentary on the situation in Northern Ireland at the time, it included a scene of homosexual rape that led a ‘moral guardian’, Mrs Mary Whitehouse, to take a private prosecution against the play’s director for procuring an act of gross indecency. (Mrs Whitehouse declined to view the play herself, fearing corruption of her soul. Sir Horace Cutler, by contrast, who was a board member of the National Theatre, walked out in disgust, informing a journalist that his wife had been forced to “cover her head” during the scene in question, although nobody seemed entirely sure how, precisely, her concealment was achieved.) The trial was eventually halted with both sides claiming victory: the Attorney General was said to have ended the case because it was not in the public interest to proceed, but the judge did rule that the Sexual Offences Act could be applied to events on a stage, and to simulated acts of indecency.
  When the play was revived in 2007, critics reflected nostalgically on the earlier controversy, but no comparable outcry greeted the revival. Time, and the emergence of an even more permissive society, perhaps both played their parts in this, but there was also, I think, a recognition that the law had no further role to play in this discussion.
  The law is rarely successful in its attempts to police art. The tension between law and art is too great. A moralist will argue that art has no special privilege, and art that transgresses against, for example, the laws of decency should be punished. Artists, according to the moralist, have no right to greater licence than any other section of the population. Artists, generally, beg to differ.
  The nature of transgression in art, as in life, is intensely problematical. It has been argued that one of the roles of art is to conquer taboos, which brings with it the assumption that such taboo-breaking is always good, and anyone who objects to it is automatically narrow-minded, misguided, and guilty of oppressing the artistic imagination. Yet not all restrictions are necessarily bad in themselves, just as not every act of transgression is worthy of note simply by the fact of its existence. Bad art does not enlarge the imagination, and an artist or writer who creates it is open to censure. Offensive and transgressive are not the same thing. Similarly, finding a piece of art objectionable is a perfectly valid critical response to it; seeking to suppress it on that basis is not.
  Yet transgression in art is not limited to questions of moral or sexual license, although the subject is most frequently raised in public in such contexts. Literature is subject to certain constraints, some physical and material, others related to the nature of the form. Can we not look at Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and say that, in its questioning of the received notions of storytelling and its steadfast refusal to abide by what was expected of the novel in the middle of the eighteenth century, it is a profoundly transgressive work, a post-modern novel before there was any ‘modern’ to be ‘post’ about? Or what of B.S. Johnson’s 1969 novel The Unfortunates, which was published in a box containing 27 separate chapters, one of which was marked first, one last, with 25 others that could be shuffled around as the reader wished? It is experimental, certainly, but is it not also transgressive in its attempt to overcome the limitations on the formal structure of a printed work? In other words, for the writer, as for any artist, transgression may not merely be a matter of subject, but of form. The transgressive abhors that which is self-enclosed, and rejoices in openness. It rejects the notion of purity, and instead revels in mongrelization. It is the art of the hybrid, of broken things.
  More recently, there was the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, first published in 1988, which led to a fatwa, a sentence of death, being declared on Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini because of the novel’s perceived slighting of Islam (and arguably Islam continues to be the single most significant cultural, religious, and social boundary that artists may transgress, even at peril of their lives). Looking back, what is fascinating about the Rushdie controversy is the variety of responses it provoked from Rushdie’s fellow authors. Their support for him was far from universal, with Roald Dahl and John le Carré being among the loudest of the dissenting voices. Clearly, it seemed, transgression was not something to be defended on principle, even by one’s own peers.
  There is one significant act of transgression that I have deliberately left until the end of this introduction, precisely because it is so relevant to some of the authors that follow, and that is crime. A number of the contributors to this volume are best known as mystery writers, but there are some difficulties in presenting crime as a purely transgressive action. In part, this is because the definition of an act as ‘criminal’ is a matter of law, but at the same time it is difficult to deny the element of choice involved in the commission of certain crimes, or the fascination, even appeal, that criminal behaviour may hold for us. A crime of passion is not necessarily transgressive, even if one might take the view that it breaches the taboo of unjustly taking a human life, because it lacks control, or perhaps planning and intent. It is born out of a rush of blood, an excess of feeling. Similarly, a starving woman who steals a loaf of bread could be considered to have done so out of necessity in a moment of weakness governed by blind appetite, not will.
  But those criminals who chooses to kill, to steal, to break, who, in the words of J. Katz in Seductions of Crime (1988), ‘take pride in a defiant reputation as ‘bad’’, are of a different breed, and their actions resonate with us precisely because they are a dark shadow of the desire that lies within each of us to breach, however occasionally, the constraints imposed upon our behaviour, and glimpse for a moment the possibility of the infinite. To quote Katz again: ‘Perhaps in the end, what we find so repulsive about studying the reality of crime . . . is the piercing reflection we catch when we steady our glance at these evil men.’
  There may be stories in this collection that you find difficult to like, or of which you may actively disapprove. There will be stories that may remind you of your own past acts, and stories dealing with acts that you believe you could never commit. Yet each of them touches upon the basic human urge to transgress, and in this you will find a certain sense of commonality, however uncomfortable it may be. Remember, after all, the words of Terence, which were inscribed upon the ceiling of the great essayist Montaigne: ‘I am a man: nothing human is foreign to me.’

  Taken from UNCAGE ME (ed. Jen Jordan, 2007, Bleak House Books). Republished with the kind permission of Bleak House Books.