Difficult Music

”You are what you think about”
I’m reading Devil’s Knot, which covers the same material as the HBO documentary “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders At Robin Hood Hills.” It goes into much more detail than the movie did, and as a result it’s that much more frightening. It’s the scariest book I’ve read since Linda McQuaig’s All You Can Eat. Devil’s Knot makes it even more clear how biased the trial’s judge was, how shoddy the police work was, how clearly Mark Byers should have been the prime suspect, and how little evidence it takes to convict someone of murder and send them to death row. It looks like the last third of the book is what happened after the convictions, so I’m looking forward to it. Because I haven’t seen the sequel to the movie, this should all be new information to me.

If listening to Metallica and wearing black can get you the death penalty, what would happen if the cops found your Akercocke albums? I’d better watch myself.

At one point in the book the author inaccurately transcribes the title of a Metallica album as Injustice For All. With the twang in Damien’s voice, that’s how it probably sounded when he testified. Mistake or not, it’s a pretty excellent title for an album. It would have been appropriate for Load.