BILL O'REILLY, PSYCHO KILLER: At first I thought there wasn't much new to say about Bill O'Reilly. But I was wrong to underestimate Nick Lemann. No, his overall assessment of Mr. Factor <http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060327fa_fact> in this week's New Yorker isn't bracingly novel; but the piece delights anyway, especially thanks to its choice excerpts from Those Who Trespass, an extremely creepy thriller O'Reilly published in 1998. The book features several murder fantasies clearly involving specific people at CBS News whom O'Reilly believes maligned him during his brief time as a correspondent there. Take this passage, for instance:
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.
Lemann persuasively suggests that the victim of this little homicide is modeled after that paragon of pleasantness, CBS anchor Bob Schieffer, whom O'Reilly claims ripped off his reporting years ago; and that the killer is a character O'Reilly based directly on himself. 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....
--Michael Crowley