My initial abhorrence gave way to the reckless anger of a teenager. I wanted to lash out at the world, drink and take pills, nullify all that I thought and felt. I became mad at myself for deliberately studying the evidence of what had soiled my childhood. While the family tiptoed around the house to prevent disturbing him, he sat in his office and entertained himself in an appalling manner. I was angry at being raised by a maniacal father and a passive mother with no means of extrication except walking dirt roads until they turned to blacktop. Perhaps my siblings had been right all along—I should’ve destroyed everything, not out of embarrassment but for the sake of my own mental equilibrium.
It’s extremely rare for anyone, let alone a son, to have access to another person’s private and unfiltered fantasies. I expected to gain insight through seeing maturity and growth, but the world of Valkyria didn’t change. My father never tired of the material and repeated it until he died. By the end—not of Valkyria’s saga but of my father’s life—plot vanished completely. The pages evolved to single-panel illustrations of garishly colored women enduring profound misery and pain. Text was scribbled haphazardly in available space, with occasional dialogue commenting on the agony of the victim.
Unfettered by market, my father was free to explore all facets of his imagination in Valkyria. There was no evolution of character or story, just a steady move toward the greater defilement of women. The books are grisly and grim. Time travel and advanced technology allowed him to include any content without the stricture of logic, physics, or medical consequences.
He made Valkyria solely for himself and never showed it to anyone—not even his wife. The secret will hadn’t specified it. The four-thousand-page chronicle of the multiverse represents the deepest core of my father’s identity, his life’s work. For over fifty years he worked on it, overlapping every other writing project. He tried to quit and he couldn’t.
Valkyria has a nihilistic bleakness blended with a child’s freedom of expression. Perpetrators feel no guilt and prisoners lack all hope. There is no morality. Life is composed of suffering. Existence has no point. It baffled him in 1963 and it baffles me today.
My father often said that if not for pornography, he’d have become a serial killer. On two occasions he told me the same story. One night in college he resolved to kill a woman, any woman. He carried a butcher knife beneath his coat and stalked the campus, seeking a target. It rained all night. No one else was out. He went home soaked and miserable and wrote a story about a man who invented an invisibility serum and killed women at a YWCA. Dad destroyed the manuscript and castigated himself for using invisibility in such an unimaginative way. For me, the crucial element of this story is a man’s impulse to tell it to his son.
Many years later he read a biography of a serial killer who owned bondage magazines at the time of his capture. According to Dad, the details of the killer’s childhood were “eerily similar” to his own, including three warning signs: bed-wetting, killing animals, and setting fires. When Dad was about twelve, a cat scratched his sister, and he put the cat on trial, dramatically acting out the roles of prosecutor, defense attorney, and judge. The cat was found guilty and condemned to death. Dad hanged it and watched it die.
The three warning signs are known as the “MacDonald Triad,” but subsequent research refuted the theory that these propensities are indicators of future violent behavior. The traits are not a recipe for a killer. They are regarded as attributes of a distressed child with poor coping skills who might develop a narcissistic or antisocial personality disorder.
If my father was correct that porn prevented him from killing women, then I should be grateful for its continuing presence in his life. Far better to be the son of a pornographer than a serial killer. But I don’t believe my father’s theory. The sight of blood, even his own, made him light-headed enough to faint. He was not athletic or strong and therefore was incapable of overpowering most people. He was also a physical coward, having never been in a fistfight. He never struck his children or his wife.
The idea that porn prevented him from killing women was a self-serving delusion that justified his impulse to depict women in torment. Thinking of himself as a serial killer if not for making porn was another fantasy on his part, one that allowed him to surrender completely to his obsessions. He needed to believe in a greater purpose in order to continue his work. Admitting that he liked it was too much to bear.
Chapter Thirty-one