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The Fool Killer
"The only American novel...in this reviewers opinion comparable to J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye...imagination, suspense, terror, and a style perfectly suited to the narrative and characters." -Harrison Smith, Saturday Review — "This is quite the book. I do not recommend it to children...nor do I recommend it for persons hable to nightmares. But anyone who wants a mystery story with a twist, and I do not mean a detective story...this should be just the thing." -America
- GenresMysteryMystery Thriller
219 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1954
4 people are currently reading
97 people want to read
About the author
Helen Eustis
14 books9 followersHelen Eustis was an American translator (from French) whose reputation rests on two novels: The Horizontal Man (1946), which received an Edgar, and The Fool Killer (1954). Eustis was born in Cincinnati Ohio and educated at Columbia University New York. She was married to Alfred Young Fisher and later Martin Harris, and worked briefly as a copywriter. She has also written a children's story, Mr Death and the Redheaded Woman. The Fool Killer was made into a horror movie staring Anthony Perkins in a role not unlike that of his Psycho character Norman Bates.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
May 28, 2020
This story isn't truly a horror tale; it's more spiritually akin to Huckleberry Finn. The first-person narrator is a boy in his early teens; an orphan on the run from his abusive adoptive parents. The setting is the heartland of post-Civil War (early 1870's) rural America. Like Huckleberry Finn, the boy, George, finds himself adrift in the world as he tries to survive and make sense of his odd adventures. The titular Fool Killer is something that -- well, I should probably let the story speak for itself.
I enjoyed the book and found it engaging, but not so hard-hitting that it made a deep impression on me. I wonder how I might have reacted had I read it as a teenager. I think it would have hit closer to home. Now it touched me with some nostalgia for a bygone America and a bygone youth, but not with urgency. Good book, though.
Opening lines will give you a sense of the tone:
I enjoyed the book and found it engaging, but not so hard-hitting that it made a deep impression on me. I wonder how I might have reacted had I read it as a teenager. I think it would have hit closer to home. Now it touched me with some nostalgia for a bygone America and a bygone youth, but not with urgency. Good book, though.
Opening lines will give you a sense of the tone:
When I come home, I knowed the Old Crab was waiting for me, and I would catch it. I kicked around the yard a time, but it was cold out there; the dark was falling, the light looked warm and yellow in the kitchen windows, so I give up and went inside. She was by the stove stirring something; I tried to sneak past , but she reached out and grabbed me by the ear.
"Where you think you're going, pray?" she says, and I knowed I was in for it. When she'd call me "sir," mostly it was a clout on the ear, but when she'd say "pray," it was a licking, sure and certain.
"It's ruint," she says. "You know that, don't you?"
I looked at the buttons on her waist, holding my head still so my ear wouldn't pull, and I says, "Yes'm."
May 3, 2023
When I was a teenager back in the 1970s my parents briefly separated. Oh, no big drama or trauma for me, however, when mom moved back into our staid suburban home a few months later, I ended up with a pretty nice-sized TV in my bedroom that she'd bought for her pseudo-bachelorettee/perhaps soon-to-be-divorcee apartment.
Late one night, or more likely in the wee hours of the morning, I awoke for no readily discernable reason (probably anxiety to which I'm overly prone), flipped on the set for company and, as was possible in that strange bygone era, I came in in the middle of a very dramatic, eerie, and rather disturbingly stylized black and white film with Anthony Perkins (who I already then well knew as Norman Bates from Psycho). Obviously back then they saved such weird artistic fare for the late, late show. I was entranced and still vividly recall the allure and excitement of the film. This was one of many moments of my teenage years in which I experienced things deliciously and frighteningly outside of the whitewashed and bland suburban world in which I grew up and which put me ever forward on my more urban and artistic and avant-garde adulthood.
Some years later, in a thrift shop I surmise, I came across the pocketbook movie edition of the novel and, remembering the thrill of catching the last half of the film that restless night of yore, snatched it up, probably for a dime or perhaps a quarter. I came across the book last week while fetishistically browsing through my rag-tag library. I picked it up, probably because I noticed that the author is female and since I've been teaching a Literature and Gender course this last year (in which I assigned a novel with a female first-person narrator written by a male author and vice-versa to explore the implications of the act of narrating across genders), and immediately became immersed this adolescent male narrator's story penned by a middle aged female author.
Well, when I was about halfway through the book I Googled Helen Eustis to see who the heck she was and discovered that she's largely remembered for this and one other novel, a mystery that won a Hugo award penned about a decade before this one, and a smattering of translations from the French. The only anecdote about who she really was come from a literary blog entry in which a reader noted the pithy bio in which the author, "began writing at eleven and has kept it up to the present day except for a brief period of schizophrenia when she tried to devote herself to housewifery rather more extensively than was compatible with her abilities in that field."
This made me laugh because the novel actually features quite a dim view of women in general through it first two thirds--comments that would surely be labeled misogynistic if penned by a male author--even if there's indeed some small redemption of womankind toward the narrative's end. Thus I realized that the novel is not so much jibing women as social roles and those who take them to heart and act as horrible as the social institutions would so often have us act. Organized religion (as well as American evangelical weirdness) and its hypocrisy gets a pretty good slap here as well.
These ruminations got me thinking that there was something rather sneaky going on just beneath the surface of this slightly picaresque adventure novel following a runaway adolescent somewhere deep in the US heartland in the period immediately following the Civil War. In the end, I feel like the novel is itself a bit of rumination on the bifurcation of the USA between North and South, settled and wild, Europeans and natives, conformity and non, the freedom that the continent once meant for adventurers and the comforts of the bourgeois society that eventually came to dominate the continent--all perfect themes for an author born in Cincinnati, so perfectly on the Mason-Dixon divide who spent most of her adult life in New York City it seems.
In all this I find a quintessentially American novel. One that doesn't ever take itself seriously enough to be great literature yet was both entertaining and much deeper than a superficial reading might lead one to believe. It made me think back at my recent re-reading of On the Road and to rethink poor Kerouac's life project as a melancholy attempt to recapture the lost American spirit smothered beneath our pretend Europeanness, all that the words "civilization" and "society" have come to mean to those of us raised in whitewashed suburbs since the Civil War, the near extermination of the continent's native cultures, and the fencing in or "development" of our once vast wilderness.
I'm off to rewatch the film now--although never issued on DVD, it's posted on youtube.
Late one night, or more likely in the wee hours of the morning, I awoke for no readily discernable reason (probably anxiety to which I'm overly prone), flipped on the set for company and, as was possible in that strange bygone era, I came in in the middle of a very dramatic, eerie, and rather disturbingly stylized black and white film with Anthony Perkins (who I already then well knew as Norman Bates from Psycho). Obviously back then they saved such weird artistic fare for the late, late show. I was entranced and still vividly recall the allure and excitement of the film. This was one of many moments of my teenage years in which I experienced things deliciously and frighteningly outside of the whitewashed and bland suburban world in which I grew up and which put me ever forward on my more urban and artistic and avant-garde adulthood.
Some years later, in a thrift shop I surmise, I came across the pocketbook movie edition of the novel and, remembering the thrill of catching the last half of the film that restless night of yore, snatched it up, probably for a dime or perhaps a quarter. I came across the book last week while fetishistically browsing through my rag-tag library. I picked it up, probably because I noticed that the author is female and since I've been teaching a Literature and Gender course this last year (in which I assigned a novel with a female first-person narrator written by a male author and vice-versa to explore the implications of the act of narrating across genders), and immediately became immersed this adolescent male narrator's story penned by a middle aged female author.
Well, when I was about halfway through the book I Googled Helen Eustis to see who the heck she was and discovered that she's largely remembered for this and one other novel, a mystery that won a Hugo award penned about a decade before this one, and a smattering of translations from the French. The only anecdote about who she really was come from a literary blog entry in which a reader noted the pithy bio in which the author, "began writing at eleven and has kept it up to the present day except for a brief period of schizophrenia when she tried to devote herself to housewifery rather more extensively than was compatible with her abilities in that field."
This made me laugh because the novel actually features quite a dim view of women in general through it first two thirds--comments that would surely be labeled misogynistic if penned by a male author--even if there's indeed some small redemption of womankind toward the narrative's end. Thus I realized that the novel is not so much jibing women as social roles and those who take them to heart and act as horrible as the social institutions would so often have us act. Organized religion (as well as American evangelical weirdness) and its hypocrisy gets a pretty good slap here as well.
These ruminations got me thinking that there was something rather sneaky going on just beneath the surface of this slightly picaresque adventure novel following a runaway adolescent somewhere deep in the US heartland in the period immediately following the Civil War. In the end, I feel like the novel is itself a bit of rumination on the bifurcation of the USA between North and South, settled and wild, Europeans and natives, conformity and non, the freedom that the continent once meant for adventurers and the comforts of the bourgeois society that eventually came to dominate the continent--all perfect themes for an author born in Cincinnati, so perfectly on the Mason-Dixon divide who spent most of her adult life in New York City it seems.
In all this I find a quintessentially American novel. One that doesn't ever take itself seriously enough to be great literature yet was both entertaining and much deeper than a superficial reading might lead one to believe. It made me think back at my recent re-reading of On the Road and to rethink poor Kerouac's life project as a melancholy attempt to recapture the lost American spirit smothered beneath our pretend Europeanness, all that the words "civilization" and "society" have come to mean to those of us raised in whitewashed suburbs since the Civil War, the near extermination of the continent's native cultures, and the fencing in or "development" of our once vast wilderness.
I'm off to rewatch the film now--although never issued on DVD, it's posted on youtube.
March 3, 2017
A touching novel set during the Great Awakening. Eustis' story is unique and poignant. it will remind the reader of their own childhood memories, and I can see why it was likened to The Catcher in the Rye.
"Enjoy the good and stand up to the bad, that's the best I can tell you how to be a man."-- Uncle
"Enjoy the good and stand up to the bad, that's the best I can tell you how to be a man."-- Uncle
July 20, 2025
Helen Eustis (1916 - 2015) lost her mother in the same flu epidemic that took Sigmund Freud's daughter Sophie, whose eldest child's use of the German words for "gone away" and "far" -- fort and "there" -- da -- Freud observed the toddler speak in the the crib as she tossed a strung ball away from the crib and then reeled it back in. When asked by his adoptive parents where those who took care of him were in the eleven years before he shows up at their store, Eustis's hero George Mellish replies, lying, "Farway," rather giving up the ghost as to whether Eustis was familiar with Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where Freud adduces the anecdote. What both Eustis and Freud are accommodating, through play, or "foolishness," is loss, but the calling of the "fool" lowers the unpleasurable tension in feeling like one. The lowering and raising of the tension is an "economic" factor, Freud speculates, in ego formation, especially one marked, as George Mellish's is, by profound loss.
Eustis published three books (in the once eurythmic procedure for commercial fiction writers: novel, short story collection, novel) by the time she was 36; she was also a mother, and subject to the addictive behaviors that would stall her career. The Fool Killer (1953) carries the noir tone of the late thirties detective novels that re-made mystery writing; the first-person vernacular narrator of Eustis's second novel is -- what Michael Tolkin has described -- "the hardboiled voice [that] brought into writing the authentic voice of spoken English at the time, the spoken English of the Depression, exhausted, cautious -- and added to that, the paradox of defiant acceptance." That's George Mellish, a post-Civil War kid, who feels a fool, who is an orphan, and is -- he reckons -- about 11 years old. His narration repeatedly puts him into the ethical corner of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn's narrator ("all right, then, I'll go to hell!"), and Eustis' novel can be read as a meditation on pastoral economies in a setting a score of years beyond the setting of Twain's novel.
I'm trying to figure out why this novel is so obscure. (In 1963, having triumphed as Norman Bates and Josef K, Anthony Perkins was Milo, George's friend, in a movie of it.) What I can only come up with is that Eustis herself struggled; and that the psychoanalytic intensity of this meditation ran a life-course that didn't stretch beyond the Era of Freud.
Eustis published three books (in the once eurythmic procedure for commercial fiction writers: novel, short story collection, novel) by the time she was 36; she was also a mother, and subject to the addictive behaviors that would stall her career. The Fool Killer (1953) carries the noir tone of the late thirties detective novels that re-made mystery writing; the first-person vernacular narrator of Eustis's second novel is -- what Michael Tolkin has described -- "the hardboiled voice [that] brought into writing the authentic voice of spoken English at the time, the spoken English of the Depression, exhausted, cautious -- and added to that, the paradox of defiant acceptance." That's George Mellish, a post-Civil War kid, who feels a fool, who is an orphan, and is -- he reckons -- about 11 years old. His narration repeatedly puts him into the ethical corner of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn's narrator ("all right, then, I'll go to hell!"), and Eustis' novel can be read as a meditation on pastoral economies in a setting a score of years beyond the setting of Twain's novel.
I'm trying to figure out why this novel is so obscure. (In 1963, having triumphed as Norman Bates and Josef K, Anthony Perkins was Milo, George's friend, in a movie of it.) What I can only come up with is that Eustis herself struggled; and that the psychoanalytic intensity of this meditation ran a life-course that didn't stretch beyond the Era of Freud.
September 17, 2019
The book was odd.
A young boy runs away from terrible conditions with a family that uses him more as a servant than anything else.
He happens upon an old man in a rundown shack who allows the boy to stay for a few days. The old man tells the boy about the fool killer, a mythical giant who is going around killing people who do foolish things.
The boy leaves there and meets a man who was injured during the Civil War, and he doesn't know who he is.
The two travel together to a revival, but the foolish minister is killed. Afterwards, the boy can no longer find his companion.
Later, the boy is taken in by a man and woman who run a store, then his friend shows back up.
That's when things get really interesting.
A young boy runs away from terrible conditions with a family that uses him more as a servant than anything else.
He happens upon an old man in a rundown shack who allows the boy to stay for a few days. The old man tells the boy about the fool killer, a mythical giant who is going around killing people who do foolish things.
The boy leaves there and meets a man who was injured during the Civil War, and he doesn't know who he is.
The two travel together to a revival, but the foolish minister is killed. Afterwards, the boy can no longer find his companion.
Later, the boy is taken in by a man and woman who run a store, then his friend shows back up.
That's when things get really interesting.
May 26, 2019
This novel of an orphaned child striking out on his own by running from his "foster" home didn't age well. Looking at it historically, I could see where it would have been much more effective in the simpler time in which it was written. When taken from a modern point of view, it is tame and nearly ineffectual in bringing forth any feelings of fear or terror; the only emotion it elicited from me was incredulity. Also, the archaic language was a hindrance to my enjoyment, but that is not the fault of the author, just the period in which it was written.
December 23, 2022
I HIGHLY recommend the the movie adaptation of this book from 1965 (directed by Servando González and starring Anthony Perkins as Milo) which seriously elevates the themes and text in a way I was disappointed the book kind of sidestepped. I think the issue is in the first person narration that seemingly never matures over the course of the book, especially once you realize it's being retold by George when he's already a bit older. The movie does a much better job of breaking the spell of George's naiveté and forcing him to grow up as the story progresses. Its there in the book but the narration choice kind of works against it.
That said, there's really striking moments in this – I love the whole Fool Killer specter – and I'm honestly surprised it isn't more well known (for the amazing movie if nothing else!).
That said, there's really striking moments in this – I love the whole Fool Killer specter – and I'm honestly surprised it isn't more well known (for the amazing movie if nothing else!).
June 25, 2021
I loved this book, but I can't think of much to say about it. It's just a good book.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews