Author: Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy / Source: WIRED
Mary Rickert’s short story collection You Have Never Been Here is one of the most disturbing books of recent years, with many of the stories touching on the abduction or victimization of children. Unsurprisingly, Rickert says she has a longstanding interest in true crime stories.
“Ever since I was young, I’ve been curious about why people behave the way they do, and what effect that has on humanity,” Rickert says in Episode 306 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast.
Stories such as “Journey Into the Kingdom,” in which a customer badgers a barista to admit that she’s a ghost, or “The Chambered Fruit,” in which a teenage girl never returns from a play date with an internet friend, are so intense and gut-wrenching that many readers assume Rickert must be channeling some deep personal trauma, which she insists isn’t the case.
“I’ve been lucky,” she says. “I really haven’t experienced any of these horrible things, and I think sometimes people think maybe I had. But I haven’t. I’ve just always been very curious and concerned about the way people behave.”
She finds that there’s often hostility to the very idea of true crime stories. “There’s this thing in our society that makes people feel like, ‘If you’re watching that and eating your popcorn at the same time, you are evil,’” she says. “But then what happens is we have a society where some people are not even able to recognize evil, or unkindness, or cruelty, because it’s coming in the shape of charisma, or beauty, or attraction.”
Instead of sheltering ourselves from uncomfortable truths, Rickert thinks we should be as honest as possible about the world’s many dangers.
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“It’s not bad to want to investigate evil,” she says, “and to do it in an adult, mature way, where we’re not just saying, ‘You’re going to be able to recognize evil because it doesn’t look like you.’ Because a lot of times it does.”
Listen to the complete interview with Mary Rickert in Episode 306 of Geek’s Guide to…
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