I recently picked an “article” from an anonymous author on the Internet which seemed altogether interesting to me, almost thrilling, on the verge of being morally disturbing, annoying, in same way I would even say threatening. Now, getting to the point, my ethic dilemma is the following one: is this story just a tale to tell or it is mainly based on real facts? Is it a rumour somebody spread on the web or maybe a fictional version of some too bad events? I wonder if either of you can help me to ascertain the real answer to this question I am itching for. Will you collaborate reading this text (Peter the strangler) and conveying your personal opinion? Thanks in advance!

“Not until I heard twice that strange sound did I wake up and sit up, feeling the piercing coolness of winter in a room without heater (should not I have had the heater mended?). An ordinary person would have listened to carefully, mindfully searching for the minutest signs of someone walking down the corridor at home. People gifted with an extraordinary imagination would have borne in mind a large number of mental pictures, images related to stranglers, rippers, snatchers, and stalkers who in the end assaulted and stabbed you on the back, and so on.

It was not my case; I am neither an ordinary plain person nor someone whom is given a special talent. It is said that I am a writer, not a bad one according to the critics (I hope so); that is why in that frightening moment in which everybody would feel a thrilling shuddering coming down the spine, I did not.

Then it only came out, suddenly flashing vividly through my mind like a burning spark, a few pages of my late best-seller book on murder and crime, an amazingly scary story mainly based on a real past crime, with a very wicked man as the chief character, Peter the strangler, someone incapable of the least remorse, not even the shadow of a doubt about his malevolent behaviour.

In these moments of anxiety and collapse, all that crime images so patiently fancied and depicted with remarkable adjectives and selected nouns in my novels started taking their own vivid life in my mind, literally springing from the very lines of my book without any room for individual imagination. I was being a victim of my own literature. Can you fancy something more frightening, any worse doom or curse? To make real the worst of the nightmares, to come across your own literary ghosts in your ordinary life… is it not a doomsday?

Feeling my sensitive nerves under every pore of my skin, almost fainting, at last I gathered all my strength together to get over this psychological challenge. I did it and a tight sleep soon followed, deep, dense, at peace. Next morning I woke up well balanced and full of energy, I went to my son’s room and found him strangled.”