Bill O’Reilly, novelist

March 22, 2006

Nicholas Lemann has a fascinating look at Bill O’Reilly in the latest issue of the New Yorker, which goes beyond the usual count-the-demagogic-attacks articles that we’ve seen before. In fact, as TNR’s Michael Crowley noted, Lemann does a fine job highlighting O’Reilly’s 1998 novel, called “Those Who Trespass,” which I’d never even heard of.

Based on Lemann description, the book sounds like it was written by something of a weirdo.

In 1998, after the launch of “The O’Reilly Factor,” but before superstardom, [O’Reilly] published a thriller called “Those Who Trespass,” which is his most ambitious and deeply felt piece of writing. “Those Who Trespass” is a revenge fantasy, and it displays extraordinarily violent impulses. A tall, b.s.-intolerant television journalist named Shannon Michaels, the “product of two Celtic parents,” is pushed out by Global News Network after an incident during the Falkland Islands War, and then by a local station, and he systematically murders the people who ruined his career. He starts with Ron Costello, the veteran correspondent who stole his Falkland story:

“The assailant’s right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of Ron Costello’s mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent’s brain stem. Ron Costello was clinically dead in four seconds.”

Michaels stalks the woman who forced his resignation from the network and throws her off a balcony. He next murders a television research consultant who had advised the local station to dismiss him: he buries the guy in beach sand up to his neck and lets him slowly drown. Finally, during a break in the Radio and Television News Directors Association convention, he slits the throat of the station manager. O’Reilly describes each of these killings — the careful planning, the suffering of the victim, the act itself — in loving detail.

Apparently, the book also offers readers a second tall, b.s.-intolerant Irish-American detective named Tommy O’Malley, who tries to solve Michaels’s murders while competing with the killer for the affection of a busty aristocrat turned b.s.-intolerant crime columnist.

I wasn’t terribly impressed with O’Reilly’s “skills” before, but this book sounds downright creepy. As Crowley put it, “The book is reminiscent of a 14-year-old’s revenge fantasy in other ways, which explains a lot. Not that O’Reilly seemed particularly stable to begin with, admittedly….”

Yeah, Bill O’Reilly’s novel is hilarious stuff. Stephen Colbert even does occasional parodies of this aspect of O’Reilly on The Colbert Report. And, if you go to Colbert Nation (http://www.colbertnation.com/colbertnation/) you can even read “excerpts” of Colbert’s novel, “Stephen Colber’s Alpha Squad 7: Lady Nocturne: A Tek Jansen Adventure.”

  • Lady Nocturne to be played by Natalie Portman in the movie version 😉

    Nope, I’m not making it up, Stephen Colbert made the offer during the checkin at the end of John Stewart’s show.

  • Colbert lovingly calls O’Reilly, “Poppa Bear”.
    I knew that Poppa Bear was always angry but I didn’t realize the full extent of his madness. Olbermann best watch out for spoons with their rocketing stainless stems.

  • Oh, and Bill O’Reilly is just creepy. Makes me almost too ashamed to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, except I’m not going to let that twit make me change.

    But he does seem to carry a lot of anger around.

  • Keith Olbermann better watch out! Wonder what Bill has planned for him.

    Hook him up to a milking machine set to overdrive?

    Drown him in a jar of pickled eggs?

    Leatherman’s Tool?

    Pair of pliers and a blowtorch, then get medieval on his ass?

  • “Colbert lovingly calls O’Reilly, “Poppa Bear”.” – kali

    And bears are at the top of Stephen Colbert’s list of dangers to the country.

    Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

    I loved Stephen’s comments on Bush and the Dubai Ports World deal, saying that he thought Bush’s brain supported the deal while Bush’s gut should have stopped it.

  • Saw “V For Vendetta” this weekend. The Lewis Prothero character reminded me of O’Reilly.

  • There was a fascinating profile of O’Reilly in Rolling Stone in August of 2004 titled Mad Dog. One of O’Reilly’s friends from his Inside Edition days Bob Cullinan noted that

    […]For vacations, he would summon the posse of male friends he’d cultivated at each stage of his life and lead them on adventures around the world. The trips were riotous fun. “You get twelve guys together and you take over a Club Med and try not to get arrested,” Cullinan says.

    According to Cullinan, fame changed O’Reilly. Whereas he used to limit his hostility to news directors and bosses, he began to aim it at friends. In August 1995, during a trip with O’Reilly, Cullinan became the object of O’Reilly’s rage when he questioned the split on their shared hotel bill. Cullinan thought they’d been overcharged for parking. O’Reilly believed Cullinan was accusing him of trying to cheat him out of a few dollars. He dressed Cullinan down in a crowded restaurant, at the top of his lungs. The two men have not spoken since, a fact that has left Cullinan more saddened than bitter.

    This, taken together with the New Yorker article, is fairly strong evidence that O’Reilly’s anger is real and not just a ploy to gain ratings. I guess this makes Roger Alies nothing more than a modern day P.T. Barnum exploiting a “freak” for financial and political gain.

    I think we can be sure that O’Reilly is oblivious to his seething anger. As this anecdote from the Rolling Stone story makes clear O’Reilly has a lack of self-awareness.

    […]The show’s name was changed from The O’Reilly Report to The O’Reilly Factor. Asked how he came up with the title, O’Reilly shrugs and says, “It means that I’m the factor in the show that separates it from all the other shows.”

    But according to Cullinan, the title actually derives from a term O’Reilly became familiar with in the mid-1980s, when his friend John Tantillo came up with a phrase to describe the small distortions and subtle shadings that seemed to shape O’Reilly’s reality. “Tantillo once remarked that everything that transpired around Bill had what he called an ‘O’Reilly factor’ to it,” says Cullinan. “We used to say back then that Bill would never lie, but he got more mileage out of the truth than anybody. . . . So that became a catchphrase for little O’Reilly stories: ‘Oh, it was the O’Reilly factor.’ ”

  • I now know the reason for O’Reilly’s hostility toward Hollywood. Because O’Reilly’s book is great literature (in the same league as Tolstoi and Dickins), the refusal of Hollywood to promote a screenplay based on it is obviously because Hollywood is liberally biased against conservatives (or whatever the Republicans call themselves these days).

  • Whatta’ saying??? That doesn’t sound like good entertainment to you? Don’t tell O’Reilly that if he’s eating pudding. You might end up clinically dead within four seconds.

  • Calling Oprah, Colbert and Olbermann……. please read the above passage of O”Reilly’s novel on your shows…. please oh please! The world needs to enjoy such great literature.

  • Did anyone read this to find any mis-typed names the find and replace missed a la The Office?

    I have a snekin’ suspicion they are refer to real people. Right, Dwigt?

  • Re: “product of two Celtic parents”

    Replace the word ‘Celtic’ with the word ‘Aryan’ and that pretty much covers it, I think.

  • …straight-shooter Shannon Michaels snuck up behind smug correspondent Heath O’Blerman, his loofah sharpened to a killing edge…”

    -excerpted from Bill’s next work of “fiction”, “Those Who Just Piss Me Off”.

  • I’m surprised that nobody has brought up the excerpt from the book where some guy does a reach-around in the shower with a woman. Someone (Al Franken? Atrios? Digby?) compared that with the calls taped when he was harrasing his former producer with the same lines on the phone.

    Now, that’s creepy…

  • At least we know that O’Reilly’s fairy-tale will never be worthy of a Disney feature film….

  • I’ve heard a few excerpts of Bill’s book on Al Franken’s radio show. The only thing more ridiculous than O’Reilly’s writing, is hearing O’Reilly read it himself. “Say baby, put down that pipe and get MY pipe UP.” Priceless!

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