The Collector

"I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch." 

With the onslaught of formulaic TV crime procedurals these days, I had to read this book with a different frame of mind. I even had to expel a bit of what I remember about the (excellent) 1965 William Wyler-directed film, starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, because as much as the film is chilling and influenced future twisted thrillers (here's looking at you, Silence of the Lambs and Misery...) it only peeled back just a few of the layers John Fowles' cleverly constructed in the pages of his debut novel. 

The Collector is a psychological suspense thriller, and depending on your opinion, the first of its kind. It involves a butterfly collecting sociopath who after winning the football pools decides to put his winnings into remodeling a countryside manor so he can kidnap and 'collect' a young woman he's been obsessed with. Since such a storyline is blurred between fiction and fact these days, The Collector by summary feels a tad less compelling, but even when I knew every turn I still managed to feel unsettled, engaged, and even conflicted while reading. There was something so stirringly captivating about Fowles pitting these two characters in this disturbing power struggle, becoming audience to how they both perceive their situation, and how complex it all was.

For the first part, you go inside the warped mind of Fredrick Clegg as he stalks and then prepares to kidnap the object of his obsession, a young art student named Miranda Grey. From Fredrick's perspective, you view Miranda as a difficulty, and you oddly start to victim blame, because well, Fredrick comes off being oh so "nice". He's fixing fancy meals, he's bought Miranda everything her heart's desire, and he's made a nice comfortable spot for her in a cellar surrounded by books and painting tools. He even states he only wants her as his "guest". The internal dialogue has you almost sympathizing with Fredrick (yeah, gross I know), as he comes off as this lonely and socially awkward guy who is looking for a friend, and just goes about it in the most ineptest way imaginable.

But the record scratch of reality comes in the middle as the narrative switches gears and we become privy of Miranda's thoughts through a secret diary she keeps between the mattress. At first this transition was jarring, and since she recounts most of everything you have read for the last 100 pages it all seems like a bad literary decision, but it's not, in fact it's a brilliant turn of character building. Miranda is now not bound and gagged by her captor, she is 'free' to speak her mind in her secret diary and we begin to understand the claustrophobic nightmare she is desperately trying to claw out of. From these pages, we learn that Miranda is quite intelligent and resourceful as she tries to figure out ways to best Fredrick, submitting to and resisting him all for the sake of survival. It's devastating to read how she slowly realizes just how insane Fredrick is and how day-by-day she becomes less of a human in his eyes, but more of an inanimate object that is only to be admired, likened to his framed butterflies. 

"I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead."