sams84 's review for:

The Private Memoirs & Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

3.0

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I found this book quite a difficult read and did take a while to get into it. However I enjoyed the different narratives and different points of view given by these. I liked how the Editor's narrative told the events based on know fact and how this set-up the Sinner's narrative which told the same story from a personal and extremely biased view. The story shows how any form of religious extremism and self-rightousness is dangerous and how it can come to dominate a person's life to the extent that they would kill for it. It can also be interpretated as a story about mental illness rather than religious extremism and shows how an obsessive and suggestable personality can become destructive and murderous. I think it is a story about both and how these two things interplay and 'feed' of each other producing the religious zealots that were abundant in the past and are becoming so again today