Novel about protecting children tells harrowing tale | The Biblio File

“Don't Mess With Me Texas: Based On The Satanic Panic, Child And Domestic Abuse And The Children's Underground Network In The 1980's” ($7.99 in paperback, self-published; also for Amazon Kindle), contains graphic descriptions of what the author calls “sexual child abuse,” “satanic ritual abuse,” and spousal abuse. It is not for the squeamish.

Narrator Kiftin O'Tool, after a college stint in Redding, finds pool parties and popping pills for back pain not quite the career she planned. At 26, promised a cush job in Hawaii by an Army recruiter, she enlists as a motor-pool driver. That's where she meets troubled Scott McConnell.

“I'm ashamed to admit it,” the narrator tells readers, “but I was obsessed with him. Everything inside of me was telling me to help him. To love him into decency. It could be my purpose in life to show him how to behave responsibly.” She adds: “I have since learned that when a child is abused by a parent, they will unconsciously seek out a mate who produces similar high anxiety. Having an overwhelming desire to ‘fix' the mate is really a deep desire to fix the relationship with the abusive parent.”

She can't quit Scott. They marry and later, with new daughter Kali, move to Texas where Scott's bizarre parents reside (his mom is stone cold, his dad a spider-keeper) and it becomes clear Kali is being sexually abused in satanic rituals that revel in human dismemberment and death.

And so the narrator goes into hiding with Kali. Mind-bending custody battles ensue over many years, and there's another marriage, but it's clear in the late '80s that police don't believe her abuse reports and the Texas judicial system is stacked in favor of the father (and the handsome Scott can talk his way out of almost any situation).

Sadly, the eventual comeuppance fails to wash away images of the immense cruelty humans inflict on one another.

Dan Barnett teaches philosophy at Butte College. Send review requests to [email protected]. Columns archived at https://barnetto.substack.com