Killing Everybody

This is a novel about something we all know, something we carry within us: our inward rage, our lives of fantasy. Not all of us accommodate rage or fantasy in the same way. Most of us--bless us--go about our peaceful business, though our confidential fury may produce fantasies we'd rather not confess. Sometimes some of us translate fantasies to outer life. Most of us do not. Brown, in KILLING EVERYBODY (he has no other name we know), carries in his heart a burden of anger so terrible we think that he will burst. In a sense, he does. His rage communicates. His wife, a masseuse (her trade unknown to Brown: he thinks she's in real estate), soothes his rage when she strokes his body, but she knows that her husband will never rest until he has been liberated from his unendurable obsession. It is she who gives his fantasy reality, she who delivers death to his enemy. In this book a diverse company walks the streets of San Francisco: a romantic policeman, a sexually compulsive newspaperman, a businessman who cannot read, a neighborhood temptress, her mother, her children, her dog, a corrupt war-making congressman--and the ghost of the boy the congressman sent to die in war. It is a compelling story significantly familiar to all of us whose fantasies and outrage are accessible to our consciousness.