Fascination With Serial Killers

Parker is a bright man and able writer, but he does need to brush up on his literary history. Gilgamesh is not Anglo-Saxon but Sumerian; Greek and Elizabethan dramatists had different views of the reasons for tragic events, and in any case both Oedipus and Macbeth were great men brought low by differing factors. Macbeth certainly did allow his ambition to turn to evil ends, but Oedipus was never evil. And Hawthorne and Melville were as preoccupied as Poe with the dark side of the human soul, and on a deeper level.

It is doing a disservice to the greats of our literary heritage to allude to them inaccurately.

JEAN BROOKHART, Huntington Beach