“Bad Karma” by Douglas Clegg: A Review

DISCLAIMER: this review has spoilers. The good news is that this novel was published in 1997 and if you haven’t read it already, I urge you not to correct that. In order to give a true review, I must lay bare its crimes. Buckle up, buckaroo, it’s gonna be a long night. 

Trey Campbell is a psychiatric technician at a mental institution. “Just a mental institution?” you may ask. No, it’s a state hospital for the criminally insane: serial killers, psychopaths, if they’re too dangerous to be in prison they are at Darden. This place is so serious it is basically its own city, complete with 20-foot-high electric fences and its own post office. It houses a dangerous woman who is strapped to her bed from head to toe, including her individual fingers, and her face is virtually always covered by a thin cotton bag. She is nicknamed “the Surgeon” and “the Gorgon”. I’ll let you use your imagination to figure those out. 

Trey is on vacation with his family when Agnes Hatcher, the restrained woman in question, somehow gets out of her restraints and mangles an orderly. Trey was already considering leaving this job because the stress and danger—on top of not being able to see his family often—was getting to him. When he gets the call from one of the supervisors that Agnes is out of her room, he’s immediately terrified that she will track him down because (get this!) she’s in love with him.

Oh, not only is she in love with him, but she also believes that he is Jack the Ripper reincarnated, AND that she is also Jack’s one and only true love reincarnated. And who said romance was dead?

While everyone in the hospital is establishing a lockdown, she has already made a disguise, killed a couple of people, and left the facility. Now, we all know how I feel about characters being exceptionally lucky in order to further the plot, so this irked me. You have a private, extremely well-guarded, state-run hospital for the most dangerous people in the country…why are all of the employees total idiots? In order to work in that kind of facility, you have to have certifications, special clearance levels, in some cases even law enforcement/security experience. How does she wander around for over an hour with no one noticing?

Clegg has some interesting plot points, and oodles of backstory for Agnes, despite the lack of common sense. The amazing part is that he writes psychopaths/sociopaths extremely well, with backstory and psychology to pad a well-rounded and developed character. But he writes every one else as this Average Joe schmuck, boring and uninterested. It was like watching a horror movie and screaming at the television, “Don’t go in there, just run!” If your book needs all the “normal” characters to be dim-witted in order for the villain to progress, you’re doing something wrong. 

And yet, Trey is not dim-witted; in fact, he’s the only person in the world who can truly understand Agnes, because they spent so much time together before she was put in perpetual bondage. He contacts the police after his children and their babysitter are attacked, and not only do the local police just not seem to give a flying fuck, but they doubt his credentials and decide that they don’t need his help to catch an extremely dangerous sociopathic serial killer. Move over, Mr. Psychology! Let us real donut-eating cops catch the pretty lady.

Speaking of pretty ladies, I need to address a very famous 90s trope: the Independent Woman. This trope was beginning to take shape in the 80s when the media finally started to portray women as being ambitious and career-driven, not just homemakers and mothers. It all went to shit in the 90s, though, when The Independent Woman became The Bitchy Woman. Does anyone else remember that scene from Life Size with the woman in the miniskirt and shoulder pads tapping her candy apple red nails on the counter? That’s how I pictured Trey’s wife Carly. Between constantly belittling him and his job, telling him when he has flashbacks of horrible trauma to “get over it”, and relentlessly bullying him into doing things that are dangerous and that he doesn’t want to do, I really really…hated her.

Overall, despite its many flaws, I enjoyed this story a lot. I’ve always been a sucker for visceral horror and psychological torment, and Clegg delivers. I’m sure his other books are better than this one, and I plan to read more of his contemporary works to see how his writing style has progressed.

Have you read any good serial killer stories lately? Let me know down in the comments, or over on Goodreads. Up next: The Dream Woman.