BORN BAD

By Denise Dumars     August 04, 2000

Shanicha Wilkins is born to a crack-addicted mother who dies during childbirth. She grows up in a household of adopted children, some of whom torment her in various ways, including leading her into a cave where hundreds of spiders attack her. Shanicha is left with an abiding fear of spiders, which manifests in the obsessive-compulsive act of showering several times a day.

As she grows, Shanicha feels an emptiness inside her; though it's never really clear in the novel if this is true only symbolically or in a metaphysical sense, Shanicha has no soul. Whatever the case, she definitely has no consciencebecause what she learns about herself as she matures is that she likes to hurt people, to manipulate them in such a way that they commit suicide. And sometimes she just kills them.

A rash of suicides hits the University of Pennsylvania, and homicide detective Ariel Dampier is called in to investigate the suspicious deaths. A fair-skinned daughter of a black mother and a white father, Ariel has never found a comfortable niche in a society that maintains the 'one-drop' rule. Even her ex-husband, a concerned campus cop who is black, couldn't deal with her insistence on honoring both sides of her heritage. Certainly her boss can't handle it, nor can he handle the assertive woman that she is in the role she's taken on.

Dampier is problematic as a protagonist in that we never warm up to her. She's always strident, fighting for her rights with the sharpest of words. Even a torrid sequence with her ex-husband doesn't ring true; we never see her being kind enough to him to get back in his good graces.

Shanicha is problematic as well; in addition to her sociopathology and obsessive-compulsive disorder, she has a schizoid break which leaves her with essentially two personalities, neither of them functional. In many ways, she's more to be pitied than scorned, which takes away from her power in the reader's eyes as a predatory killer.

Her favorite method of killing is also unimpressive; it's just not that hard to convince a depressed rape victim to jump to her death from her dorm room, which Shanicha does a lot. Well, sometimes she gives them a little push. And adding the discussion of the date-rape survivors group muddies the waters of this thriller. Instead, more supernatural thrills and insight into Shanicha's madness would have been fascinating; her alter egos could have really gone to town.

Hoffman states that he took his inspiration from such 'bad seeds' as Ray Bradbury's 'Small Assassin.' Surely, the idea of a person 'born bad' is fascinating, since it's an endlessly debatable condition. Hoffman is an effective writer of realistic prose; there is a reasonable amount of police procedural in the novel that plays out well. . The reader does want to know what Shanicha will do next, and also how Ariel means to catch her. Using her 'adopted daughter' Chanda, a young street girl that Ariel befriends and shelters, as bait to draw in Shanicha is a brilliant move, and Chanda proves to be the most interesting character in the novel. She's streetwise in a way that Ariel would only hope to be; her sense of street justice is gritty and leaves the reader mentally saying 'yes!' when she gives Shanicha her comeuppance. Along the way Shanicha--like some real-life psychos--gets a disciple, a student of her methods. But her acolyte isn't up to the challenge, and finally fails.

Is Shanicha brought to justice in the end of the story? In a way, yes; but legally, no. As she's always been a victim of her own mental illnesses, her fate at the end is another of the living hells she's built for herself all along, a worse punishment than any system of justice could mete out.

I wish this were a creepier and more surreal thriller. Hoffman is an effective writer of suspense fiction, but to me, at least, this novel simply isn't scary, and I've seen it too many times to be shocked by Shanicha's sexual excitement over the contemplation of her crimes. I liked the spider scene, however.

Maybe Hoffman needs to stop hanging around with the 'dark suspense' crowd and revisit the roots of horror. I think it's the central ambiguity of the novel that puts me off; I have trouble finding a killer scary that I feel so sorry for. After all, there's just no way to feel sorry for Hannibal Lecter, even if soldiers did eat his sister.

BORN BAD is currently available in a lovely hardcover edition with a cover illustration by Harry Morris. The paperback version will be available this fall from Leisure Books.

BORN BAD, by Barry Hoffman. 404 p; c. 2000. $40 from Cemetery Dance Publications, P. O. Box 943, Abingdon, MD 21009. ISBN 1-881475-99-9.