He faces a daily diet of incest, child rape and family violence. Largely they're a product of memory more than of any creative effort. When he's done playing with those girls, he attempts to rape his own daughter. He ruptures both her eardrums with punches. She has four abortions before she's 14.
Nobody asks any questions.
He waits two beats for effect. He's the perpetrator of it all. He stubs out a cigarette in a big glass ashtray on his glass-top desk. Vachss first ran across grisly child abuse cases nearly 30 years ago, when he tracked syphilis carriers for the Ohio Department of Public Health. So he wrote his first novel in the early '70s.