A Dark Night in Aurora

I have read this before, and have no memory of it. Not a good sign. Perhaps that's brain fog plus Covid stress.

This is a fascinating but irritating read: irritating because Holmes is a liar and malingerer, and because the first part of the book is devoted to describing how he was an all-American child—baseball, big smiles, good grades, lovey-dovey, the whole nine yards. That part goes in far too long, and could have been summarized; the length of it was insensitive given what he did. It just went on and on about how he was the Best Boy you could have ever wanted, and not in context of his mental illness developing later. So odd.

For the lying and malingering: Is he severely mentally ill? Absolutely. But. He lies to his therapist and to the author, and others. He creates symptoms, writing in his notebook and telling the author that his symptoms interferes with what he wanted to do, so he chose to be only be catatonic at lunchtime. He claimed to be not be fully in control of his actions, yet stopped before he headed out to the theater to check his dating profiles, to see if he might have a chance of hooking up. And on and on. He also claimed that, in the theater, he couldn't see to choose targets because his helmet visor was scratched up—it was brand new. I found myself really getting angry and frustrated with the subject in a way I never do; I have been studying psychology since before I started my undergrad degree in it in 1990, and this never happens. This guy got under my skin.