Heart Fever

Bob Van Laerhoven is a writer and journalist who has travelled the world’s warzones and seen what people do. He is haunted by it. The evil that humans do. But I suspect that the darkness haunted him before that: it’s not everyone’s choice, that line of business. He chose to look.

These stories aren’t comfortable. He wasn’t going for “comfortable”. How does a terrorist feel? What is happening in the mind of the man who kills an innocent man for revenge, generations later? How do people delude themselves? And above all, how do people betray each other? Even the lightest and most innocent of these stories is a narrative layered with betrayals.

Mostly we like dark stories because they reassure us. We’re fascinated by evil but we don’t have to own it. People do terrible things – but it wasn’t us. There are villains down there in the dark. Drug addicts, terrorists, thieves, perverts… and closer to home, petty criminals, wicked parents, treacherous friends. We read the stories, transfixed, delighted. Because it wasn’t us. We are here in the light – looking down into the underworld. Against these crimes, our own are negligible. We’re in the clear. Perhaps we are heroes even.

Bob Van Laerhoven doesn’t play those games. Yes - to find the darkness he went all the way to war-zones and to far, exotic, troubled countries, so perhaps he also wanted to believe that the darkness was somewhere else. And on the surface of his writing there is the journalist shouting: I was there, this is what they did, I saw it, now look at the consequences. Focus on that, if you like. These are things you need to know. But if that is enough for you, read fast, skim the pages, close the book quickly, play some music.

But play it loud, or you will hear, echoing beneath that shouting, another voice that whispers (don’t listen !) I didn't just watch, I did it, it was me. And then, as an echo of an echo – barely heard but impossible to escape - you were there too… don’t you remember? We did it together.