Camille’s Sense of Smell
Camille seems to be equipped with an unusually sensitive sense of smell. Pervasive throughout the narrative—perhaps fifty occasions or more—Camille refers to a scent. So precise and detailed is this sensory ability that her descriptions range from the direct to the kinesthetically poetic: Jackie O’Neele hasn’t just been chewing gum, she’s been chewing Juicy Fruit gum. The foul stench of an animal processing plant produces an odor that goes beyond smell and into the realm of touch: “it’s a solid. Like you should be able to cut a hole in the stink to get some relief.” And then there is her version of Sherlock Holmes when she sizes up another character’s most recent activities without previous knowledge of them: “I could smell liquor on your breath when you came in, underneath a layer of Certs—wintergreen?” The exact purpose of heightened sensitivity of one sense is not exactly clear, but it can be seen as an offset of the lowered sensitivity to touch which is suggested by the extensive history and evidence of self-mutilation of her own flesh. And, of course, she’s also a reporter with, one must hypothesize, a nose for news.
Camille’s Complicated Sexuality
Camille has a complicated sexuality which is inherently perverse due to violent traumatic episode in her youth. A connection exists between violence and sexuality which guides Camille’s guilt-driven urge to cut into her flesh. Beyond the rape which is naturally enough all it would take to mess a young girl up, there is a memory from her childhood in which her confused mingling of imagery almost spells everything out. At the age of twelve she wanders into a hunting shed in the woods where that sense of smell might have begun its intensification and certainly where her complicated sexuality kicked in. Keep in mind that her ultimate reaction to the following is her first memory of masturbating: “Ribbons of moist, pink flesh dangled from strings, waiting to be dried for jerky…dirt floor was rusted with blood…walls were covered with photographs of naked women…being held down…One woman was tied up, her eyes glazed, breasts stretched and veined like grapes…I could smell them all in the thick, gory air.”
Planting the Big Picture in the Little Details
Very often in a novel—especially a work of crime fiction—the writer lays out important clues that may not necessarily help a first-time reader figure things out, but take on much greater significance during a re-reading. Clumsy writers not yet experienced enough to plant details like this with a sense of delicacy often do give away too much. This example of Camille being prodded into a childhood memory by an offhand remark of another character is an excellent example of how the imagery of precise details can lay a foundation that pays off big much later:
“When I was a child, I remember my mother trying to prod me with ointments and oils, homemade remedies and homeopathic nonsense. I sometimes took the foul solutions, more often refused. Then Marian got sick, really sick, and Adora had more important things to do than coaxing me into swallowing wheat-germ extract.”
Toothless Truths
“I recognized the wild curls. But the grin was gone. Natalie Keene’s lips caved in around her gums in a small circle. She looked like a plastic baby doll, the kind with a built-in hole for bottle feedings. Natalie had no teeth now.”
The gruesome signature of the killer of two girls which informs the world that the same person is responsible is that after killing them, the murderer set to the long, hard, difficult, time-consuming task of pulling their teeth out one by one with probably something no better suited for the job than pliers. This horrifying aspect of an already brutal series of crimes proves to be the central image of the story because it is the image which takes on the greatest assumption by police and the public as to who might be responsible and, as a result, seriously limits the pool of potential suspects. Almost anyone in town could have physically accomplished the strangling which actually caused death, but pulling teeth out one by one? That’s the kind of detail that immediately complicates investigations because if there is one thing that can be said about law enforcement as a collective entity it is that they lack a proper amount of imagination and as a result too often get bogged down by a theory with which the facts must match, but never will.
