Because the Night by James Ellroy

dominion over human feelings into dominion over other people. Like his early burglary career, it began with a shinny up a drainpipe and a vault into an open window. But where before he had come away with knicknacks to please his father, this time he came away with questions and answers that he knew would make him the spiritual patriarch to scores of pliant souls.
    The window yielded tape recordings of confidential interviews conducted by Alfred Kinsey in 1946 and 1947. The interviewees were described in terse sentences and were then asked to describe themselves. The variance factor was astonishing—the people almost always defined themselves by some physical abnormality. The Q. and A. sessions that followed proceeded along uniform patterns, revealing mundane matters—lust, guilt and adultery—things which John Havilland’s immune system had surmounted in early adolescence.
    After over two hundred hours of listening to the tapes, John knew two things: One, that Kinsey was an astute interviewer, a scholar who considered factual admissions illuminating in themselves; and, two, that that knowledge was not enough and that Kinsey had failed because he could not get his interviewees to talk openly about fantasies beyond variations of fucking and sucking. He could elicit no admissions of dark grandeur, because he felt none himself. His interviewees were hicks who didn’t know shit from Shinola. Kinsey operated from the Freudian/humanist ethic: Provide knowledge of behavior patterns to enable the subject a viewpoint of objectivity in which to relegate his neuroses to a scrap heap of things that don’t work. Show him that his fears and most extreme fantasies are irrational and convince him to be a loving, boring, happy human being.
    After over six hundred hours of listening, John knew two more things: That the most profound truth lay in the labyrinths that coiled behind a green door in the interviewee’s mind the very second that Alfred Kinsey said, “Tell me about your fantasies”; and, two, that with the proper information and the correct stimuli he could get carefully chosen people to break through those doors and act out their fantasies, past moral strictures and the boundaries of conscience, taking him past his already absolute knowledge of mankind’s unutterable stupidity into a new night realm that he as yet was incapable of imagining. Because the night was there to be plundered; and only someone above its laws could exact its bounty and survive.
    Now armed with a mission, there remained only to discover and actuate the means towards its fulfillment. It was 1967. Drugs and hard rock flooded Harvard Yard, spawned by a backwash of students, townies, and traveling hippies willing to protest anything, try anything, and ingest anything in order to gain themselves, lose themselves, or achieve a “transcendental experience.” Social change was in the wind, producing a “consciousness explosion” that John Havilland considered fatuous and propagated by failures, many of whom would not live to see the period dwindle out of its own emptiness, replaced by a new reactionary fervor. Giving the youth culture a life expectancy of two years at the most, he decided to become one of its ikons. People would follow him; they would have no choice.
    Two abortions performed gratis in his antiseptically clean Beacon Hill apartment gained him a hushed reputation among Harvard undergrads; a record heard at a pot party provided him with a powerful sobriquet. “Doctor John the Night Tripper” was a Creole who shrieked odes to dope and sex, backed up by two saxes, drums, and an electric organ. At the party, a heavily stoned anthropology professor shoved an album cover in John Havilland’s face and yelled, “That’s you, man! Your name is John and you’re in med school! Dig it!”
    The nickname stuck, fueled by the young doctor’s forays into manufacturing LSD and liquid