Is one of America's most beloved authors a psycho killer?

Wherever William T. Vollmann goes, people die

Vollmann is an absolutely beloved figure in a particular part of the literary community, the sort who buy up out-of-print Alexander Theroux novels online and have Dalkey Archives tattoos on their asses. The ostensible king of the GoodReads high-minded literary circle, Nathan N.R. Gaddis, is a man who writes reviews in a painfully-annoying Arno Schmidt pastiche schtick and had fucking William T. Vollmann as his profile picture for zonks ages. I don’t personally care for Vollmann’s work; I generally find his infamous methodology a lot more “interesting” than his actual output. Ramon Glazov already mercilessly savaged William T. Vollmann’s work, along with half the other precious McSweeneyites, in an absolutely classic hit piece some years ago. My thoughts are more-or-less in-line with Glazov’s to the point where I don’t really feel the need to clarify my own opinions on the question of “is Vollmann’s work actually any good?” My question is more along the lines of “is Vollmann a CIA-connected serial killer with a substantial body count?”

No, I’m not fucking around.

The first piece of evidence we should address is this very petty but principal fact: William T. Vollmann just fucking looks like a serial killer.

He looks like someone did one of those creepy cartoon-to-real-life jobs on Dilbert but spliced it with one of the characters from The Hills Have Eyes. He looks like a creation out of a claymation remake of Deliverance. He looks like an artisanal candle in the shape of Karl Rove made by David Cronenberg that has been burning for a few hours already. I’m hoping these zingers provide me some modicum of comfort when he pulls me out of my bed in the middle of the night so he can place my body on a meat hook.

Okay so let’s pin that one to the corkboard:

But wait, there’s more! In a profile with Sactown, the profiler describes an enormous amount of erotic paintings and photographs of Vollmann’s that make the man sound like a character out of Marquis de Sade’s Juliette who the eponymous protagonist is about to learn a debauched life lesson from, like that one guy who talks to her at length about his “Godsfuck”:

The 3,000-square-foot space behind him is warm and inviting, tidy yet chockablock with art and art supplies, every surface filled with the notoriously prolific author’s equally effusive output of paintings, prints and photographs, all but a couple of which feature naked ladies. Here’s one of his favorite models, Lindsay, as a mythic creature, arms outstretched like wings. “She’s very cute when she bares her teeth like a little fruit bat,” he says fondly… Other female subjects hold whips. Some dance naked across fauvist landscapes, some are odalisques framed by ornate decorative elements. Still others lean toward what could be described as more conventionally transgressive, like a photographic print of a woman, naked from the waist down, urinating into a bowl.

Not convinced? You’re more judicious than you look. Fine, let’s wade into deeper water. Figuratively and literally.

When Vollmann was nine-years-old, his six-year-old sister drowned in a pond under his supervision. In an interview with Sactown, he had this to say about the incident: “I guess the good thing that did come out of it is that I’m more accepting of losers, criminals, murderers, all kinds of people, because they’re my brothers.” Look, it’s a little odd to talk about the “good things” that came out of your child sister drowning to begin with, and it’s especially odd when the incident has you saying you see “criminals and murderers” as “your brothers.” And to what is that fraternal affinity owed, Bill? Could the same affinity derive from that time your best friend was shot in the head, along with the only other witness, in front of you? Because yes, that did also happen.

“Jesus,” you might think to yourself, “I knew you were an asshole, but this is a new low, poking fun at a man’s personal tragedies like this.” Sure, you say that now, but please follow along and I think you’ll start to see a startling picture emerge. Because I don’t just think that dear old Buffalo Bill here is some naturally-occurring psychopathic killer, rather, I think he was programmed to kill, as McGowan might have put it. Bear with me.

When Vollmann got out of uni he started saving up money, as any responsible young man might. The thing is, Vollmann wasn’t saving up to buy himself a home, he was saving up to ship out to Afghanistan and pal around with the Mujahideen. Hey, why not? Who doesn’t love a gap year hanging out with Osama bin Laden? Since he was there anyway, why, he might as well write reports to bring back to the United States to appeal for aid for those brave Mujahideen fighters in Afghanistan, and correspond with Robert fucking McNamara, the man behind the fucking Vietnam War, in order to obtain advice as to how best to accomplish this. As if that wasn’t enough, Vollmann made his way in successive trips to such alarmingly-suspicious locales as Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia, Israel, and others. It seems like there was a span of years where, wherever the C.I.A. happened to be at peak operations, there was Vollmann, tagging along obediently behind like a tie-dyed schmuck following the Grateful Dead on tour, wandering about like a bellend with his pen and pocketbook out. It was on one of those fateful trips that Vollmann’s buddy got his brains scrambled by a bullet, along with the aforementioned only witness. Shortly before Bill took some grisly photos of their bodies. That's not a joke by the way, he describes having a photoshoot with the corpses in his book on his sus adventures, The Atlas.

I’m not the only one to think Vollmann was working for the C.I.A.—in Vollmann’s retelling of his time in Afghanistan, An Afghan Picture Show, it seems like nearly everyone he meets believes he’s working for handlers at Langley. “Well, perhaps it was no wonder that almost every Afghan or Pakistani I talked to believed that I was some omnipotent C.I.A. manipulator,” says Vollmann. Rather grimly, he adds: “nearly every Afghan or Pakistani thought that he was controlled.” Vollmann of course also has his deep ties to the McSweeney’s crew, led by Dave Eggers, who published Vollmann’s 3,000+ page ethical calculus sperg storm that he claimed served the purpose of “[helping] mass murderers to kill people mindfully.” Ah, yes, Dave Eggers, those were the days—the man is now a spent force in the literary world who primarily writes terrible allegorical novels and some of the worst political satire I’ve ever read, but it can be easy to forget that there was that entire post-9/11 era where his twee bullshit ruled the world. Yes, Dave Eggers, whose older brother Bill works in neoliberal think tanks and is a former Bush White House staffer, and who (Dave) once worked with a Sudanese refugee to pen a novel about said refugee’s struggle¹ which was conveniently released right before peak spending on the War on Terror and American interest in Sudan. The perfect publisher for a man of Vollmann’s pedigree.

Vollmann spends a lot of his time, when he’s not enshrouded in the fog of war, hanging out with people on the absolute margins of society. Drug addicts, prostitutes, loners who live off the grid in the Sacramento River Delta. You know, just the sorts of vulnerable people who, if they disappeared or suddenly died for instance, would not be missed. All of these are hand-waived away as “research” for his “brilliant” novels. That last demographic, actually, was for a thriller about the son of a C.I.A. agent. Have I mentioned that quite a bit of Vollmann’s work is drawn from personal experience? Or that Vollmann’s father, Thomas, was a professor at Indiana University? You know, that university that had those C.I.A. allegations against one of its profs (which turned out to be true), and is known for the MKULTRA experiments it conducted, including ones on children, while Bill was growing up?² Should I also mention that someone with the surname “Vollmann”—an alumni from the U.S.-State-Department-founded Cold War operation the Free Berlin University—wrote a widely-cited paper on the ethics of human experimentation?

This is to say nothing of the fact that the F.B.I. had Vollmann down as a suspect in the UNABOMB case, with his file from the Bureau describing Vollmann as something of a narcissist and a sociopath, nor to mention that his file also involved investigations for involvements in both Amerithrax (including allegations that his handwriting matched the letters) and fucking 9/11. There’s information on an F.B.I. interrogation Vollmann went through in the same files, which includes a passage where Vollmann bizarrely defends child pornography (a detail in the files that Vollmann volunteers to us himself). The C.I.A. has records on Vollmann too, but those ones are apparently still classified, meaning they are probably still considered pertinent to matters of “national security” interests. How interesting.

Profiles on Vollmann, like the aforementioned Sactown piece, read like their authors are watching Vollmann hold a serrated knife to the throat of their youngest child. It seems like no matter what fucked up, deranged, antisocial things Vollmann might say, the author still concludes that Vollmann is either a blessed angel or just “a regular guy.” Sometimes he’s somehow both. Vollmann can look into a camera and immediately begin waxing about his fascination with “erotic, sexy death” and talk enthusiastically about “looking into a dead skull’s eye sockets,” or he can straight up call for mass population culling in the billions as he so often does these days, and he will still be described as having a generous and beatific “affection for humankind.” At least the Sactown doofus takes a moment to note a Silence of the Lambs vibe when Vollmann finally shows him his bedroom closet, previously the meat locker back when his home used to be a butcher shop, a room that he told the electrician was “for storing [his] victims” and is filled with dresses he wears when in his feminine alter ego, Dolores. An alter ego, I might add, that his own wife knew absolutely nothing about. In fact, she apparently knows absolutely nothing about any of the excursions he takes and adventures he has while out “doing research” (read: dismembering hobos).

Does it matter if you believe any of this? I mean I sure do, but if you’re some “official-story”-pilled skeptic who somehow still thinks America was caught unawares by 9/11, then there’s simply no convincing you. You have resigned yourself to live under the blissful assumption that the world around you sits entirely above the surface, that you do not live in constant clear and present danger, that you are your own agent with thoughts and feelings you chose for yourself, that your liberal democratic freedoms actually exist as anything more than the pacifying muzak blaring over the loud-speakers to obscure your ear from the throbbing fascist heartbeat at the centre of your world. The truth of the world is too scary for you to think about, so you simply don’t. You simply write off any evidence you encounter as “obviously absurd” and you drown the dawning dread that perks up in your soul when confronted by it by imbibing in another round of vacuous Netflix binge-watching.

So let’s say you don’t believe me. What am I, then? Just some asshole for picking on poor old William T. Vollmann and his trauma collection? Well, let’s apply some of that “moral calculus” that Vollmann loves so much: let’s consider a world where Vollmann has merely been in a hundred wrong places at a hundred wrong times. I would call someone who supported the Mujahideen in Afghanistan while extending the hat for American aid and fawningly asking actual war criminals for their advice on how best to go about doing it a fucking unsympathetic asshole. I’d call that person a piece of shit. I’d call that person William T. Vollmann. I’d say that someone like that is more than capable of killing his own sister, his best friend, even his fucking daughter, and feel little to no guilt assuming as such if I happen to be wrong. What is William T. Vollmann? A C.I.A. asset? A human skin collector? Or is he just a pathetic misery tourist? A pathological exploiter of other people’s suffering so he can write shitty fucking elevated-pulp about smackhead hookers or simp for U.S. State Department foreign policy objectives? This is a man who wrote a massive tome extolling the “pragmatic” policy of the extermination of the lion’s share of the human race. I don’t care about being insensitive to Vollmann. I haven’t harmed half the people Vollmann has.

But that’s only if I can’t convince you. This last bit of evidence is exclusive to this blog and rather damning, rather undeniable; some very interesting info I picked up from a friend of mine who works in publishing and has actually met Vollmann. What he told me was tharsfgergggggggggggggggggggggggggggggg

My apologies. Where was I? Ah, yes, my poor, late publishing friend. He told me that Vollmann is just a regular guy with a deep affection for humankind and an intangible air of innocence about him. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have dinner reservations with John Bolton and the Zodiac Killer at a nice little whorehouse in Myanmar.

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1. That man is now a part of the South Sudanese government.

2. To avoid making this paragraph even more unreadable than it already is, I’m going to include some more supplementary notes about Indiana here. Indiana University was also where Alfred Kinsey, a follower of Aleister Crowley, wrote his work that deals with some… erm… interesting views on child abuse. Indiana University is also the alma mater of Jim Jones and serial killer Herb Baumeister, both of whom very suddenly dropped out partway through their degrees, both of them who had been pursuing medicine.