Confessions of a Sociopath by M.E. Thomas Read Free Book Online

volunteered for the Red Cross, and engaged in haphazard same-sex liaisons, one time with a nurse after being universally adored during a hospital stay. There were incredible parallels to my own life, from such seemingly insignificant ones like teaching Sunday school or being a model hospital patient to relatively more prominent ones like fluid sexuality. I was floored.
    Cleckley does clearly lay out why he believes that Anna fits his criteria, primarily because of her lack of remorse about her lascivious lifestyle, but it’s clear that she is not just a sum of points on a checklist to him. She is a person. And it wasn’t the checklist that I identified so strongly with upon reading Cleckley’s book; it was the people. Even Cleckley acknowledged that the checklist was just a gross generalization of why these people seemed so similar to each other—despite their vast differences in education, background, socioeconomic status, criminal history, etc.—and yet so different from the rest of the world. I could quibble with whether or not I met a criterion like “unreliability,” but I could not deny the remarkable similarities that I shared with Cleckley’s patients.
    Cleckley’s book was widely popular, circulating beyond a purely academic or medical audience. He edited the volume several times, making efforts to create as exhaustive a profile as possible of the modern-day psychopath. Cleckleyunderstood that psychopaths and sociopaths, while sometimes or even often engaged in extremely antisocial acts, could also live lives completely undetected, adapting to their surroundings well enough to pass as normal, even to become contributing members of society.
    Because Cleckley realized that there were sociopaths in the world who either do not engage in criminal behavior or are too clever to ever get caught, what began as a study of solely male patients in mental institutions became a much larger volume that included women, adolescents, and people who had never been institutionalized. Many of his later subjects, like Anna, had learned to live relatively normal lives within the general populace. From my own experience, I was sure that, had Cleckley peered into the classrooms of today’s law schools and offices of mega law firms, he would have found plenty of viable test subjects.
    Now that I knew that I was not alone, that there were people out there much like me, I wanted to find out more about us.
    He gazed upon the mirth around him, as if he could not participate therein. Apparently, the light laughter of the fair only attracted his attention, that he might by a look quell it, and throw fear into those breasts where thoughtlessness reigned. Those who felt this sensation of awe, could not explain whence it arose: some attributed it to the dead grey eye, which, fixing upon the object’s face, did not seem to penetrate, and at one glance to pierce through to the inward workings of the heart; but fell upon the cheek with a leaden ray that weighed upon the skin it could not pass. His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement,and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention
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    —J OHN W ILLIAM P OLIDORI ,
The Vampyre
    In 1819, John William Polidori wrote a novella called
The Vampyre
, inspired by a fragment by Lord Byron, which would spark a vampire craze across nineteenth-century Europe and influence Bram Stoker and the modern vampire genre. The title character of Polidori’s novella was based on the wayward Byron himself. The vampire enters London high society and beguiles all who cross his path with his mysterious and contrary manners. Accompanying a young gentleman companion southward through Rome and Greece, he seduces and murders young women, unbeknownst to his companion, only to die himself from an apparent murder. A year later, however, the vampire reappears in