{"id":6918,"date":"2006-03-22T09:45:55","date_gmt":"2006-03-22T14:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=6918"},"modified":"2006-03-22T09:45:55","modified_gmt":"2006-03-22T14:45:55","slug":"bill-oreilly-novelist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/bill-oreilly-novelist\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill O’Reilly, novelist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nicholas Lemann has a fascinating look<\/a> 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<\/a>, Lemann does a fine job highlighting O’Reilly’s 1998 novel, called “Those Who Trespass,” which I’d never even heard of.<\/p>\n

Based on Lemann description, the book sounds like it was written by something of a weirdo.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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….”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6918","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6918","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6918"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6918\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6918"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6918"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6918"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}