Free Killer by Stephen Carpenter Page B

which I have titled Killer Unmasked.
    Arnie and the people at Terrapin loved the concept and the title for the fourth book, in which we finally reveal the identity of Killer and he meets Katherine Kendall face to face. Only “we” are having a bit of trouble with that revelation. I have managed to keep Killer’s identity obscured from readers—and from my very smart editors—for one good reason: I don’t know myself.
    Actually, that’s not completely true. It’s not that I don’t know who he is, the truth is I’m reluctant to reveal him because the gimmick of keeping Killer’s identity hidden has served me well. Whenever there was a shaky story point or an implausible scene that I wanted for dramatic purposes I would simply chalk it up to Killer’s mystique. We don’t know how he does certain things, Katherine Kendall can only surmise . And alas, even the intrepid Katherine is not always right.
    But after three books the gimmick is starting to feel tired and it is time to progress the series and unmask the monster to my heroine and I am hesitating. From here on it will be harder. It may even mean the series is drawing to a close. And it’s too late to back out now. Terrapin has already leaked word that the soon-to-be-published Killer Unmasked will “reveal the true identity of Killer once and for all!” as the advance promotion has promised. The waiting lists for the book are double what they usually are.
    So I have stuck myself with a problem and now I must solve it. I have put it off until the end of the book and now, of course, anything will seem anticlimactic. I sit staring at the screen and I realize I have been asking the wrong question. It’s not a matter of how to reveal him—the real question is, Does it matter?
    The most terrifying thing on earth is the human imagination. Consult the horrors of history and you will trace each horror back to the Big Idea someone thought up and then put into action. And when you conjure a monster for a book, it is not only your imagination at work, it is the reader’s imagination that will focus the finest details of your monster. If the reader wants to picture the killer as their eighth-grade math teacher or their ex-husband it’s best to let them—they’ll do it anyway. But if you spend chapter after chapter detailing every single aspect of your monster’s appearance and personality you run the risk of drowning the reader’s images with yours, and you will wind up with a list of characteristics instead of a character. But now I am rationalizing and I know it.
    I pick up a pencil and roll it between my palms, thinking. How do I have my cake and eat it too? Until now I have enjoyed the luxury of writing a human monster with as few details as possible, leaving Killer as a nameless free-floating malevolence bedeviling Katherine Kendall. But now the piper must be paid.
    Katherine has a vague physical description of him—deliberately vague. He is the overlooked man in the crowd: average height and weight, medium brown hair, small brown eyes obscured behind rectangular wire-framed glasses. But the vague, average quality of his appearance isn’t just a dodge on my part. His non-descript appearance is inherent to his madness. This is where I am with the book now, and Katherine Kendall is about to spell out the rest for me. I put the pencil down and begin to type notes on Killer’s personality that have been rattling around in my brain for years; notes that will become the shape and sense of the final chapter in the book, in Katherine’s voice, as she writes her final report:
    All of Killer’s victims had, in random encounters, ignored him or not acknowledged him in some way, and this is the fuel that sets his molten rage to flame. The key to his pathology is the volatile mix of two opposing and compelling forces: his innate grandiosity, and the fact that from a very young age he was treated quite literally as though he didn’t exist. For Killer, any kind of