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A review by goldenassam
The Ice Man: Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer by Philip Carlo
1.0
Stopped after about a third of the book. This book is bad. Not badly written, not badly constructed - but upsetting, because it takes on the self-portrayal of a convicted murderer uncritically, almost naively. The result is a narrative that cries out for a Tarantino film adaptation and could inspire fascination, especially in younger male readers, where dismay would be more appropriate.
An example in which it became clear to me again and again that here a murderer is telling his own story, as it were: Young Richard Kuklinski's trips to New York. Kuklinski is certainly portrayed in the book as a sadist and psychopath - but strangely enough, there is always a provocation in his earlier crimes. Even his murders targeting gay men supposedly don't start out of nowhere, but because he was flirted with in an aggressive manner. To me, this sounds very much like retrospective justification by an unreliable narrator.
The book's fixation on graphic depictions of violence would have been more acceptable to me if there was a touch of source criticism - such as an occasional questioning of what about Kuklinski's descriptions is self-glorification, what is simply invented, and what his general motivation is for telling so much about his crimes. This weighs all the more heavily, since in part it is doubted whether Kuklinski was even active as a murderer to that extent.
An example in which it became clear to me again and again that here a murderer is telling his own story, as it were: Young Richard Kuklinski's trips to New York. Kuklinski is certainly portrayed in the book as a sadist and psychopath - but strangely enough, there is always a provocation in his earlier crimes. Even his murders targeting gay men supposedly don't start out of nowhere, but because he was flirted with in an aggressive manner. To me, this sounds very much like retrospective justification by an unreliable narrator.
The book's fixation on graphic depictions of violence would have been more acceptable to me if there was a touch of source criticism - such as an occasional questioning of what about Kuklinski's descriptions is self-glorification, what is simply invented, and what his general motivation is for telling so much about his crimes. This weighs all the more heavily, since in part it is doubted whether Kuklinski was even active as a murderer to that extent.