When Ted Kaczynski killed himself in a federal prison last June , it closed a confounding chapter in the history of American domestic terrorism. Unlike fascists, white supremacists and antigovernment conspiracists, Kacyzinski espoused righteous principles: protecting the environment and facing the destructive role of technology. “[T]hreats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE,” he wrote in a 35,000-word manifesto that ran in the New York Times and Washington Post in 1995.
“They are not the result of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence.” He wasn’t wrong. But the papers only published his words on the recommendation of the FBI and U.
S. attorney general to prevent him from doing more harm — beyond the three people he’d murdered and nearly two dozen he’d injured with mail bombs. Maxim Loskutoff’s second novel, “Old King,” is an attempt to sort through Kaczynski’s contradictions, to acknowledge the manifesto’s prophetic elements while stressing it’s the product of a sociopath.
That’s fine fodder for a novel — the stuff of Dostoyevsky, even — though Loskutoff isn’t trying to deliver a “Karamazov”-grade philosophical tale. Rather, “Old King” is a more modest blend of police procedural and great-outdoors yarn. Set largely in the Montana wilderness where Kaczynski holed up, the novel explores the line where independence becomes so distant from empathy that it’s.
