Book Notes: John Marrs’ The Good Samaritan

John Marrs writes thrillers about serial killers, and there’s usually a social critique aspect to his novels. The Good Samaritan is probably the grimmest of his books, offering not a glimmer of hope in its depiction of human vileness. If you want to read something engrossing, fast-paced, and utterly depressing, this is the perfect novel for you.

The Good Samaritan is about a murderous psychopath named Laura who uses her job at a suicide hotline to convince unstable people to kill themselves. There are echoes of the euthanasia debate in the novel, and altogether it’s a metaphor for the poisonous effects of empathy when taken to the extreme. Laura embodies the kind of toxic femininity that destroys men and corrupts any form of male-female relationship. She is so successful because the way we have set up our institutions favors the self-deluded smugness of women like Laura. She’s only one of the shitty women in the novel, and the interactions between well-meaning but weak men and enraged, nasty women make for disturbing reading.