Dexter Morgan is a mild-mannered blood-spatter expert with Miami Homicide -- and, secretly, a serial killer who channels his compulsions into slaughtering others who have themselves been getting away with murder.
At this point, the image of Maier crosses the border into eccentricity and compulsion, and into the unfunny sadness that patrols those zones.
"Devil," written by Kelly Masterson, is a hyper-urgent piece of work in which one mistake, and its unexpected consequences, pours like a torrent into the next, such that the increasing craziness of the men's conduct appears, after a while, as an unavoidable compulsion built into their situation.
The tension between compassion and compulsion came into sharp focus last spring.
It seems a little like revenge, a stinging snap of the towel for our eternal compulsion to dive into fiction and surface with autobiography.
Ms. DeVries wanted someone who understood her son's seeming compulsion to gaze into a glowing screen for 16 hours on some days, subsisting on crackers and pita chips and listening on a headset to strangers discussing strategy for League of Legends.
The compulsion to come into the city -- and that is what the tunnel is for; no one should pretend it is an escape route -- is as old as the city itself.
However, Arab secularism was still alive and kicking, Iran's fire and brimstone brand of revolutionary Islam had not yet emerged, Saudi Arabia had not yet successfully exported its reactionary form of Wahhabi Islam and no Egyptian youth had yet gone to fight the communists in Afghanistan - and so Mahfouz felt no fear or compulsion to go into hiding like Rushdie.
I still have a compulsion to go into betting shops.
Woman have claimed his spirit is still charming them, drawing them upstairs with an overwhelming supernatural compulsion to venture into his old room.
Similarly, the compulsion to enter into the world and help mankind is included, but it is altered from being motivated by guilt to a warning message against a possible invasion from outside forces.
