Revisiting Bill O'Reilly's creepy-assed 1998 novel
In 1998, Bill O’Reilly published his first and, so far, only novel: “Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder.” The main character is a violently bitter journalist named Shannon Michaels, who, after being pushed out of two high-profile positions, takes revenge on four of his former colleagues by murdering them one by one.
On Wednesday, shortly after O’Reilly was ousted at Fox News, the apparent result of a mounting protest against his long record of alleged workplace sexual harassment—and, more to the point, the financial damage that this protest was doing to the network—I picked up a copy of “Those Who Trespass” and read it straight through. The novel, peppered with rants about ex-wives, newsroom politics, and the Long Island Expressway, is an astonishing read for many reasons, including O’Reilly’s credible ability to write in free indirect discourse. Another is the unchecked lust for revenge and violence that permeates the novel. And there is the fact that a veteran newsman preys upon a younger female co-worker in the very first scene.
The second sentence of “Those Who Trespass” describes Ron Costello, a correspondent for Global News Network, on assignment in Martha’s Vineyard and struggling with a “basic human need, the need for some kind of physical release.” Costello spots a pretty camerawoman at a party, happily notes that she’s had too much vodka, and approaches her with “intense sexual hunger.” Costello is “universally loathed” at his network, O’Reilly writes, but Costello doesn’t mind: “His energy was directed toward getting as much as he could of what he wanted. And tonight he wanted this freelance GNN camerawoman named Suzanne. He wanted her in a big way.” When Suzanne rejects Costello, he’s furious. (“Goddamn bitch. She’ll be sorry,” he thinks.) Then the vengeful Michaels kills Costello by shoving a silver spoon through the roof of his mouth and into his brain.
As Nicholas Lemann noted in a piece about O’Reilly, from 2006, for this magazine, the feud between Michaels and Costello in “Those Who Trespass” is based on O’Reilly’s experience at CBS, in the eighties, during the Falkland Islands War. O’Reilly and his crew had captured exclusive footage of a riot in Buenos Aires, which CBS spliced into a report delivered by the veteran network correspondent Bob Schieffer, who never mentioned O’Reilly by name. In the novel, this is exactly what happens to Michaels, who, while still in Argentina, confronts Costello and assaults him in front of their co-workers. He is blacklisted from the network, and spends the next decade plotting his revenge.
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It gets worse, much worse:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/reading-bill-oreillys-old-novel-about-a-tv-newsman-who-murders-several-people-after-losing-his-job?intcid=popular
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