Tales of the unexpected

How’s this for a good opening? ‘I took out a gun and painted the bullets gold.’ If that were a novel the author would win prizes; but he isn’t a novelist, he’s a nutcase. Let’s call him ‘J’. J was convinced that his wheelchair-bound grandmother was a vampire. He visited her one morning, did her laundry and asked if there was anything else he could help her with.

She said ‘No’. So I put on my suit and shot her in the heart. She was wiggling and screaming at me. Then I shot her three more times real fast.

After this he laid her body on the bed, drank some of her blood, uttered a prayer and torched the house. What makes this testimony so vivid and compelling is the detail: the laundry, the suit, the prayer. A fiction writer might not have had the daring to mingle the commonplace with the heinous quite so casually.

J is an average loony by the standards of Dr Persaud’s casebook. Every page teems with scenarios for sick movies. We hear of a psychotic who was discovered interfering with his best friend’s girlfriend. Stricken with remorse he sliced his entire face off and fed it to his dog. Or there’s the Japanese video-game enthusiast who grew bored of flying virtual planes and hi-jacked the real thing. He stabbed the pilot in the neck and guided the plane earthwards for a display of low-level acrobatics. Thankfully he was unable to disengage the auto-pilot and he was overpowered by cabin crew. The plane landed without further mishap. Commenting on his day’s work, the hi-jacker shrugged: ‘Sorry about the pilot. I wanted to demonstrate to the public that planes are safe.’