It was a torturous form of mind control like you might expect to read about in a horror story or a science-fiction novella from the 1950’s. Rather than fiction, however, it took place in the real world and in an average, middle-class suburb of San Francisco. I survived it. But not unscathed; indeed, it took thirty years for me to come to grips with what happened to me.

Taken separately, the events that occurred defy belief. Looked at in sequence and as a whole, they yet remain senseless and brutal. And since I will never fully understand the motives of the people involved, I will never to my satisfaction be able to explain their ritualistic barbarism. My attempt was to simply tell the story the way I found it as I came to know the many, varied pieces. By so doing, I hoped to shed light on possible motives without interjecting my own rationale. However that may be, the result of my narration was a horror story or – as described by cultural critic Philip Kobylarz – a psychological thriller, a murder mystery without an actual corpse, and a love story gone really, really bad.

And yet, it is simply a memoir, a story about certain horrific events in my life – events I have reason to believe were ritualistically duplicated in cases other than my own. But even worse, I have no real reason to believe such events have necessarily ceased.

Tom

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