Editor's Introduction
to Filicide:
Softening the blow

How to introduce a work that takes some of our fondest, adult ideas about childhood and children and turns them upside down? In Filicide, Vrana Hempstead shows you the same old world, but he (yes, Vrana is a he) pulls off the difficult task of showing it to you through children's eyes, describing it with the fluency of an adult mind. The world as children have historically perceived and continue to perceive it--NOT the world we adults like to think they perceive.

What you read in Filicide is an indictment of adult hypocrisy, of extremely well-intentioned adults who generation after generation unwittingly pass on the very behavior (violence in all its forms) which most adults and most societies condemn so earnestly.

It's as if suddenly the children of the ages have been given a clear, articulate voice with which to speak their pain--and their hope.

Hint: The first two chapters, where Hempstead explains the theory of filicide, are pretty tough sledding. Lots of abstract argument. But once he gets down to specific cases, the books becomes gripping and even shockingly revealing. Jump ahead to Chapter 3, where he starts in on his radical re-reading of our myths and you'll see what I mean. The heart of his argument--and the book--is his long, startling re-interpretation of Frankenstein, from the first one (Shelley's) to the latest out of Hollywood.

Along this long, ancient path, extending from Adam and Eve to HAL 9000, Hempstead deals with such questions as:

• Why, in spite of our best intentions, do we continue to raise generations of children given to violence when they grow up?
• What does the long-running image of a god nailed to a cross have to do with children and violence?
• What is the connection between American male circumcision and American violence?
• What amazing key to our on-going violence is hidden in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?
• Was HAL 9000 circumcized? What was his problem anyway?
• Why is it likely that Myra Breckinridge will be remembered as the Great American Novel?
• What do Oedipus, Abraham, Hamlet, Faust, and Wyatt Earp have in common?
                                                   --Doc Cuddy, Editor

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See also our interview with Vrana Hempstead.

Filicide: The Mythic Reality of Childhood

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