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Monstrous: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer but for the Grace of God
"Monstrous" is the true story of a young man's coming of age, tracing the author's journey of subtly drifting toward and within a homicidal state before awakening at age twenty-one.
492 pages, Paperback
First published April 5, 2002
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About the author
Tommy Walker
1 book5 followersNever killed anyone nor spent a day in jail or received a parking ticket.
Monstrous: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer but for the Grace of God
Monstrous: The Autobiography of a Serial Killer but for the Grace of God
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September 18, 2020
The self-flagellating confessional autobiography has a long and distinguished history in Western literature, commencing with St Augustine and continuing with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Pamela des Barres and Drew Barrymore.
(St Augustine of Hippo)
(The GTOs, with Pamela Des Barres centre)
The whole bloody miserable genre has recently been turned into a Lord-of-the-Rings-and-then-some epic by Karl Ove Knausgård under his provocative title Min Kamp. So here is Tommy Walker (a pseudonym for very understandable reasons) and his (most handsomely) self-published 500 pages of mostly rancid nasty horrible memories.
I almost gave up on this because the first 200 pages or so are intolerable. People who write memoirs think their readers will be goggling at every last possible eency weency detail.
When the bell rang to signify the end of one class before the start of another, most kids were quick to go to their lockers, mill around and chat, for five short minutes having reprieve from the regimen of the classroom. For humans as a species I’m sure this is very important, but it’s something I never got into. I often arrived at class first and left last to bypass any awkwardness in the halls.
and
In the wintertime when it snowed we’d go sledding down Dead Man’s Hill, so named for its treacherous steepness. Danger, to a certain extent, only added to the thrills.
So Tommy trudges dully through every usual introverted-kid phase – obsession with sport, with one particular girl, with insects – and we crawl along with him, stabbing ourselves with pencils and groaning aloud with boredom. The humdrum blatherings are slightly enlivened when Tommy discovers masturbation and decides that his sexual identity is actually “male lesbian”. Self-abuse begins to take over – we get pages about the strange places he found to strum his dingle dangle. He attempts to find a girlfriend but the only one he locates – for some curious unstated reason – decides to dump him after the first date. We just can’t fathom out why, and neither can Tommy. It drives him crazy.
Many many pages are spent contemplating First Girlfriend.
He leaves school without any qualifications. He tries work, gets sick of menial disgusting jobs, tries college gets sick of that, then has a kind of spiritual breakthrough – the problem with human life is possessions. He must get rid of everything, starting with his family and his home. So he wanders off to become a homeless wanderer, like some kind of Indian sadhu. He doesn’t cut his hair or shave for a year. This is the 80s not the 60s when all this kind of thing was normal.
He forms a strange non-sexual relationship with an older woman Sophia who is a lesbian but who lets him stay at her place, but then she chucks him out. He tries college again, then drops out, then tries homelessness again, all right, clearly this guy is mentally unwell.
I notice I am still reading this stuff. Why? I have gradually become hypnotized by Tommy’s horrible life. Unceasing ghastliness. It’s page 300 and Tommy is not yet 18 years old. I did not know that he’s only 21 when the book ends.
By now he is definitely becoming a Jeffrey Dahmer type, with flat-out bonkers fantasies and wanking procedures, all laconically detailed for our delight.
While resting on the swings at a certain beach resort, I watched a teenaged girl. She was writing something, probably a letter, while sitting at a picnic table as the waves rolled in and out. Probably watched her for plural hours before summoning the strength that I did. I approached her and asked her if she would mind some company.
“Yes, actually, I would. You see, I’m writing a letter.”
Later, bush tired as I tended to get walking all day long, I nonetheless took up a physical chase of a woman who had jogged on past me. I in my battle-worn jeans caught up to her in her aerodynamic shorts and asked her “Wanna race?” She shook her head no so I detoured from her route.
He contemplates walking about with a sandwich-board sign:
MAN WANTS WOMAN
I AM DEPERATELY LONELY AND CAN’T SAY HELLO
Just as you might be dredging up the adumbration of a vestige of a trace of sympathy for Tommy the Wretched, he tells you about his attempt to have sex with the family cat:
Dixie started making very strange sounds of protest obviously, terrible sounds the likes of which I’d never heard before.
You’ll be relieved to know that Tommy does not pursue this line of inquiry any further.
So, Tommy winds up back home and finally gets a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant, and discovers to his surprise that he’s finally found something he’s good at – washing dishes. He gets himself a little apartment, and everything is rolling along okay, except that alas he still can’t communicate with other human beings. It’s like they’re all on Planet Earth in a giant jacuzzi having a whale of a time and he’s on Planet Pluto watching them through a telescope. . .
As a virtually friendless shadow man without access to societal keys, all doors seemingly closed and labelled “For Members Only”, all I saw of life was people running their grooves on the sidewalk.
So naturally he begins to think about killing people. Preferably girls. But not in a cruel way. It was like this – women, clearly, are the life-creating sex. Men, alas, are the destructive sex. Whilst Tommy thought he might be a lesbian, he had to acknowledge that he was a man and therefore destructive. However, on the bright side:
I didn’t have to actually kill anybody so long as I believed myself to possess the psychological power to do so.
On the other hand, he dreams of success and forms ambitions to compete at the very top of his chosen field:
The bench-mark is thirty-six for Ted Bundy, a conservative forty-three or so for the Green River Killer, and you want to reach that upper echelon, rub shoulders and hobnob with the greatest in your field. It’s only natural.
But you’ll be happy to know that the nearest he gets is to buy a blow up doll and beat her up (“you like that, doncha!”)
Then it all goes away – the murderous maundering meditations fade out and are replaced by a new obsession -placing ads in the Singles sections of various newspapers. We get pages of his bizarre appeals for a woman of post-menopausal age (in order to avoid children) :
With an appeal to a much older woman, I am numerically a very young man, but being so securely grounded to nature, to the, and my origin, I am able to state from the vantage point of a man who has never fragmented, that I am a very, very old little boy.
Mostly – no surprise - he gets no responses. Now and again he gets a response, calls her up, arranges a date and gets stood up.
In the middle of this he goes to see Ken Russell’s movie of Tommy and this blows his mind – Tommy is me!! Hence the pseudonym of this book.
Meanwhile, he rekindles his friendship with Sophie, the older lesbian, who’s also a hoarder, and begins filling up Tommy’s apartment with dumpster junk, as her own place, and all her rented storage spaces, are already full.
Anyways, finally after spending more than 700 bucks on these singles ads, he connects with a nice 48 year old lady called Hannah who accepts Tommy for what he is, an androgynous 6 foot three male lesbian, and what do you know, it’s a happy ending, which in this particular book was pretty unexpected.
Is any of this actually true? Who knows. But it’s bizarre enough to be. In the end this is an unsparing but weirdly touching portrait of youthful male loneliness.
(St Augustine of Hippo)
(The GTOs, with Pamela Des Barres centre)
The whole bloody miserable genre has recently been turned into a Lord-of-the-Rings-and-then-some epic by Karl Ove Knausgård under his provocative title Min Kamp. So here is Tommy Walker (a pseudonym for very understandable reasons) and his (most handsomely) self-published 500 pages of mostly rancid nasty horrible memories.
I almost gave up on this because the first 200 pages or so are intolerable. People who write memoirs think their readers will be goggling at every last possible eency weency detail.
When the bell rang to signify the end of one class before the start of another, most kids were quick to go to their lockers, mill around and chat, for five short minutes having reprieve from the regimen of the classroom. For humans as a species I’m sure this is very important, but it’s something I never got into. I often arrived at class first and left last to bypass any awkwardness in the halls.
and
In the wintertime when it snowed we’d go sledding down Dead Man’s Hill, so named for its treacherous steepness. Danger, to a certain extent, only added to the thrills.
So Tommy trudges dully through every usual introverted-kid phase – obsession with sport, with one particular girl, with insects – and we crawl along with him, stabbing ourselves with pencils and groaning aloud with boredom. The humdrum blatherings are slightly enlivened when Tommy discovers masturbation and decides that his sexual identity is actually “male lesbian”. Self-abuse begins to take over – we get pages about the strange places he found to strum his dingle dangle. He attempts to find a girlfriend but the only one he locates – for some curious unstated reason – decides to dump him after the first date. We just can’t fathom out why, and neither can Tommy. It drives him crazy.
Many many pages are spent contemplating First Girlfriend.
He leaves school without any qualifications. He tries work, gets sick of menial disgusting jobs, tries college gets sick of that, then has a kind of spiritual breakthrough – the problem with human life is possessions. He must get rid of everything, starting with his family and his home. So he wanders off to become a homeless wanderer, like some kind of Indian sadhu. He doesn’t cut his hair or shave for a year. This is the 80s not the 60s when all this kind of thing was normal.
He forms a strange non-sexual relationship with an older woman Sophia who is a lesbian but who lets him stay at her place, but then she chucks him out. He tries college again, then drops out, then tries homelessness again, all right, clearly this guy is mentally unwell.
I notice I am still reading this stuff. Why? I have gradually become hypnotized by Tommy’s horrible life. Unceasing ghastliness. It’s page 300 and Tommy is not yet 18 years old. I did not know that he’s only 21 when the book ends.
By now he is definitely becoming a Jeffrey Dahmer type, with flat-out bonkers fantasies and wanking procedures, all laconically detailed for our delight.
While resting on the swings at a certain beach resort, I watched a teenaged girl. She was writing something, probably a letter, while sitting at a picnic table as the waves rolled in and out. Probably watched her for plural hours before summoning the strength that I did. I approached her and asked her if she would mind some company.
“Yes, actually, I would. You see, I’m writing a letter.”
Later, bush tired as I tended to get walking all day long, I nonetheless took up a physical chase of a woman who had jogged on past me. I in my battle-worn jeans caught up to her in her aerodynamic shorts and asked her “Wanna race?” She shook her head no so I detoured from her route.
He contemplates walking about with a sandwich-board sign:
MAN WANTS WOMAN
I AM DEPERATELY LONELY AND CAN’T SAY HELLO
Just as you might be dredging up the adumbration of a vestige of a trace of sympathy for Tommy the Wretched, he tells you about his attempt to have sex with the family cat:
Dixie started making very strange sounds of protest obviously, terrible sounds the likes of which I’d never heard before.
You’ll be relieved to know that Tommy does not pursue this line of inquiry any further.
So, Tommy winds up back home and finally gets a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant, and discovers to his surprise that he’s finally found something he’s good at – washing dishes. He gets himself a little apartment, and everything is rolling along okay, except that alas he still can’t communicate with other human beings. It’s like they’re all on Planet Earth in a giant jacuzzi having a whale of a time and he’s on Planet Pluto watching them through a telescope. . .
As a virtually friendless shadow man without access to societal keys, all doors seemingly closed and labelled “For Members Only”, all I saw of life was people running their grooves on the sidewalk.
So naturally he begins to think about killing people. Preferably girls. But not in a cruel way. It was like this – women, clearly, are the life-creating sex. Men, alas, are the destructive sex. Whilst Tommy thought he might be a lesbian, he had to acknowledge that he was a man and therefore destructive. However, on the bright side:
I didn’t have to actually kill anybody so long as I believed myself to possess the psychological power to do so.
On the other hand, he dreams of success and forms ambitions to compete at the very top of his chosen field:
The bench-mark is thirty-six for Ted Bundy, a conservative forty-three or so for the Green River Killer, and you want to reach that upper echelon, rub shoulders and hobnob with the greatest in your field. It’s only natural.
But you’ll be happy to know that the nearest he gets is to buy a blow up doll and beat her up (“you like that, doncha!”)
Then it all goes away – the murderous maundering meditations fade out and are replaced by a new obsession -placing ads in the Singles sections of various newspapers. We get pages of his bizarre appeals for a woman of post-menopausal age (in order to avoid children) :
With an appeal to a much older woman, I am numerically a very young man, but being so securely grounded to nature, to the, and my origin, I am able to state from the vantage point of a man who has never fragmented, that I am a very, very old little boy.
Mostly – no surprise - he gets no responses. Now and again he gets a response, calls her up, arranges a date and gets stood up.
In the middle of this he goes to see Ken Russell’s movie of Tommy and this blows his mind – Tommy is me!! Hence the pseudonym of this book.
Meanwhile, he rekindles his friendship with Sophie, the older lesbian, who’s also a hoarder, and begins filling up Tommy’s apartment with dumpster junk, as her own place, and all her rented storage spaces, are already full.
Anyways, finally after spending more than 700 bucks on these singles ads, he connects with a nice 48 year old lady called Hannah who accepts Tommy for what he is, an androgynous 6 foot three male lesbian, and what do you know, it’s a happy ending, which in this particular book was pretty unexpected.
Is any of this actually true? Who knows. But it’s bizarre enough to be. In the end this is an unsparing but weirdly touching portrait of youthful male loneliness.
January 14, 2016
So far, we're still in his childhood and just about to begin Chapter 4. Normally, by the fourth chater, I should have an idea of the narrative flow structure, but it's hidden. The heft of the book suggests that nothing from the author's life may have been expunged from the record and it becomes a worry that I might get lost in the forest for the trees. Indescriminate inclusion is a big worry at this point.
However, with the exception of one passage that seemed to lose focus and almost shook my interest (the bottom half of chapter one) the prose flows nicely. Nothing appears fictionalized (in the sense that scenes are written from a dramatic POV with story needs being addressed and answered), although one expects that the names may have been changed in any case.
One lone grammar error so far, too, which bodes well for a book like this.
The beginning of Chapter Two: "...the latter twentieth century." Since there wasn't a former 20th century (unless you want to count circa 2000BC), I think the passage would read better as either "the latter half of the twentieth century" or as "late twentieth century" (no article). Also, twentieth century might look better capitalised. I would capitalise, my logic being that it is the name of a proper place, temporally speaking, just as Southern and South are capitalised in certain instances when they are not being employed as directional markers.
On Page 250, almost half way thru...
We've passed the point of being just a tad outside the flow of social norms with Young Tommy. With the occasional reminders of the Green River killer and personal drama of self-imposed "isolation in a crowd" type of deal, things at this point feel creepily electric.
The tense issues actually hide two functions. One is obviously to avoid the over-usage of the word I; must be the issue any decent autobiographer has to contend with. Two second function might be unconscious... we are, afterall, exploring a mind that understands that rule following is a choice... and that function would be to make things immediate, to make it now.
While the author may have new perspective on these periods in his life, he may not have the distance. The child reclaimed, as it were, the best one can reclaim his inner child.
Of course, I could just be over-anal-ising things.
One of the most interesting things about reading this book is how often the old mirror radar went PING! VERY nicely written, even though it could use a bit of bit a trim, this is the story of a man adrift in his mind and his efforts towards a kind of "perfection."
Once the moment of _________ happens, the book comes to a swift conclusion. Which is what I suspected would happen; which I had hoped would not. I wanted to read about his "recover" with the same details as his descent.
Of course, I realize now, that that is probably not possible even in the best of circumstances because very early on we are introduced to the Watching Self and in the closing pages it is clear the observer is gone. Details become unimportant, verbs replace adjectives, and the movie director filming his life story has packed up and left.
Tommy gets a life, in other words.
However, with the exception of one passage that seemed to lose focus and almost shook my interest (the bottom half of chapter one) the prose flows nicely. Nothing appears fictionalized (in the sense that scenes are written from a dramatic POV with story needs being addressed and answered), although one expects that the names may have been changed in any case.
One lone grammar error so far, too, which bodes well for a book like this.
The beginning of Chapter Two: "...the latter twentieth century." Since there wasn't a former 20th century (unless you want to count circa 2000BC), I think the passage would read better as either "the latter half of the twentieth century" or as "late twentieth century" (no article). Also, twentieth century might look better capitalised. I would capitalise, my logic being that it is the name of a proper place, temporally speaking, just as Southern and South are capitalised in certain instances when they are not being employed as directional markers.
On Page 250, almost half way thru...
We've passed the point of being just a tad outside the flow of social norms with Young Tommy. With the occasional reminders of the Green River killer and personal drama of self-imposed "isolation in a crowd" type of deal, things at this point feel creepily electric.
The tense issues actually hide two functions. One is obviously to avoid the over-usage of the word I; must be the issue any decent autobiographer has to contend with. Two second function might be unconscious... we are, afterall, exploring a mind that understands that rule following is a choice... and that function would be to make things immediate, to make it now.
While the author may have new perspective on these periods in his life, he may not have the distance. The child reclaimed, as it were, the best one can reclaim his inner child.
Of course, I could just be over-anal-ising things.
One of the most interesting things about reading this book is how often the old mirror radar went PING! VERY nicely written, even though it could use a bit of bit a trim, this is the story of a man adrift in his mind and his efforts towards a kind of "perfection."
Once the moment of _________ happens, the book comes to a swift conclusion. Which is what I suspected would happen; which I had hoped would not. I wanted to read about his "recover" with the same details as his descent.
Of course, I realize now, that that is probably not possible even in the best of circumstances because very early on we are introduced to the Watching Self and in the closing pages it is clear the observer is gone. Details become unimportant, verbs replace adjectives, and the movie director filming his life story has packed up and left.
Tommy gets a life, in other words.
March 9, 2010
I so much enjoyed this book, despite its difficult moments, and I was very much immersed into Tommy's being. It kept me awake reading into the early hours of the morning until I could finish the book. There were particular moments when I broke into manic giggles, only to be followed by tears (of relief?). Quite a catharsis for me.
I have to admit, it takes some time to get 'into' the character of Tommy, and that doesn't come about until chapter ten or so.
Maybe the reader can't (or isn't allowed to) see behind the idiosyncracies of Tommy's narrative voice for the benefit of perceiving the 'real' protagonist; in other words, to better understand the Tommy in spite of Tommy.
But about one fifth into the book I felt that I was getting closer to where I'm supposed to be, and yes, soon enough I reached the part where Tommy follows the dentist's directions to the letter - that was the first of numerous epiphanies. I laughed both at Tommy and with Tommy - and with myself, of course. It was at that moment when the Tommys became one; I was hearing the voice of the person I was reading about.
Although this is an introspective story, I did get a strong sense of the physical landscape playing a central role, almost equal to that of a sentient character/participant in the narrative.
I have to admit, it takes some time to get 'into' the character of Tommy, and that doesn't come about until chapter ten or so.
Maybe the reader can't (or isn't allowed to) see behind the idiosyncracies of Tommy's narrative voice for the benefit of perceiving the 'real' protagonist; in other words, to better understand the Tommy in spite of Tommy.
But about one fifth into the book I felt that I was getting closer to where I'm supposed to be, and yes, soon enough I reached the part where Tommy follows the dentist's directions to the letter - that was the first of numerous epiphanies. I laughed both at Tommy and with Tommy - and with myself, of course. It was at that moment when the Tommys became one; I was hearing the voice of the person I was reading about.
Although this is an introspective story, I did get a strong sense of the physical landscape playing a central role, almost equal to that of a sentient character/participant in the narrative.
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