The Sculptor

All things happen for a reason, and I believe I screwed up/switched up the readings/viewings on the syllabus for a reason, too. No one wants to read two weeks in a row of my outright bashing yet another novel in the genre I claim to love, and I think if I’d written this post a week ago, many of you would be left wondering: “Carla, do you even like to read BOOKS, period?”

The answer, in the case of The Sculptor, is a resounding “no”, not if this what the genre has come to. In fact, I question whether I even want to continue writing in it, if this is what sells.

Start off with our killer, a cookie cutter character if ever I encountered one, and these elaborate murder scenes that are frankly torture porn. Throw in one of the silliest signatures – making his victims into representations of Michelangelo’s work – I’ve ever heard of and you end up with a book that is the psycho killer genre equivalent of The DaVinci Code. (I realize the aforementioned was a huge bestseller, and we should all be so lucky as to be Dan Brown, but it’s still not a compliment, just in case you need clarification.) Don’t even get me started on the romance and relationship between the big strong man and the puny little library mouse of a woman – whose life is, naturally, in danger – that he finds strangely alluring.

It’s almost hard for me to pinpoint exactly what I disliked most of this book. Some of my fellow classmates have mentioned in their entries that they found the dialogue clunky and the repetition of the same jarring, and I agree wholeheartedly. However, since we should presumably all be thinking about our writing style when we read others, I have to admit repetitious dialogue is a trick I frequently employ in my own work. I apologize now to my former readers, am currently editing most instances of this trick out of my own book, and promise to never ever do it again in the future. It does take you out of the story and serves no real purpose other than to bash the reader in the head with info they already had.

But let’s get away from style and get back to substance. I’ll admit this killer was extremely creepy, and these murder scenes lingered in my head long after I closed the book, and that is indicative of a successful horror novel. It did scare me. The thought of becoming the Sculptor’s prey gave me chills. But I think it was more the graphic nature of these scenes, and not the personality ascribed to the killer by the author, that I found frightening.

I’ve got a confession to make. I’m not a huge fan of the torture porn that’s so prevalent in the horror genre. Movies like Saw and books like The Sculptor bother me, and not necessarily in a thought provoking way, and I think it’s because so much of the action is “on camera”. Very little is left to the imagination, and the killers in these works don’t really seem to be serving a higher purpose. Maybe they do really have a “higher purpose” and I just don’t get it. I guess you could say I’m old school. I don’t want my vampires to sparkle, but I do like my serial killers to be romantic figures. The Sculptor was not.

This is not a book I’ll revisit, but I will say it made me think about the genre in general and my own writing, so I’m glad I had the chance to read it.