Melville House Books

Jessica Mann: She's had it with images of brutalized women

Bestselling crime novelist writer Jessica Mann — who also writes a regular column on crime fiction for the prestigious Literary Review — says she’s quit writing about new crime fiction because of increasing amounts of “sadistic misogyny.”

“Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims’ sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit as young women are imprisoned, bound, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or burned alive,” she tells the Observer in this story by Amelia Hill. “Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say when they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more will be reviewed by me.”

The Observer says Mann cited an instance where “a female corpse recently appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague’s new book, the author pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Mann said the publisher replied: ‘Never mind that. Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don’t. Nor do dead children or geriatrics’.”

What’s more, Mann says, “The trend cannot be attributed to an anti-feminist backlash because the most inventive fiction of this kind is written by women. They are, one author explained to me, best qualified to do so because girls grow up knowing that being female is ‘synonymous with being prey’.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.