The evil that men do

Early one summer’s morning in 1994, Paul Jennings Hill, a defrocked Presbyterian minister, gunned down a doctor, John Britton, as he arrived for work at an abortion clinic in Florida. Unrepentant by the time of his execution nine years later, Hill (who I really don’t recommend Googling) was associated with the Army of God (ditto), which urges the murder — or ‘justifiable homicide’ — of abortion providers in the United States.

<br> Given how often Joyce Carol Oates’s awesomely prolific output concerns male violence and women’s bodies, it’s no surprise to find her using this as material; with Trump vowing to undo Roe vs Wade, it’s timely. By turns icily subtle and sledge-hammer crude, her unadvertised recasting of the case begins by putting us fairly terrifyingly into the shoes of the killer — here, Luther Dunphy, a roofer seeking obscure payback for his three-year-old daughter, who had Down’s syndrome and died when he crashed his car on a frozen highway.