Shooting the Heart

Earl Madden, a former teacher of English and American studies at a private high school for boys in Boston, is on the locked ward of a state mental hospital. Manic-depressive and heavily sedated, he thinks he may have killed his wife. Moving back and forth in time in his mind, through periods of relative clarity and severe psychic fracture, he recalls his unstable childhood, his brief courtship and marriage with its moments of normalcy and happiness, and his obsessions with serial killers, all of whose stories he tells, from the Boston Strangler and Ted Bundy to Charles Starkweather and John Wayne Gacy. He broods, too, about American history and literature, his lost parents and brother, and especially his missing wife. Did he kill her? Could he have done such a thing?