After years of writing his own original screenplays (he wrote "Obsession" with Paul Schrader), he signed to direct two adaptations from popular fiction: "Carrie" (1976), based on one of Stephen King's starkest horror legends, and "The Fury" (1978), after John Farris's superior thriller novel.
He wrote "The Obsession," his grandly confessional "J'Accuse," rehearsing, in skirmish after skirmish, his fight for the staging of his own adaptation.
Jenkins writes, "The obsession with the superbeing helps account for the messianic and autocratic tendency among some occult groups, which were all too willing to acclaim particular individuals as incarnate masters who would usher in a glorious new age".
Woolf noted in her diary — in an entry that Bechdel reproduced by hand (all the quotations in the book are drawn, not scanned or retyped from a printed page) — that once the novel was written her obsession ceased: "I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her".
Many novelists can write about obsession -- it goes with the territory, so to speak, chiming with the tunnel vision required to write in the first place -- but only the best writers can step to one side and see what obsession looks like from the outside, in all its instantly sobering foolishness.
In attempting to write about obsession, he embraces narcissism.
Aurora Police Sergeant Matthew Fyles read aloud excerpts from the 29-page notebook, in which Holmes allegedly wrote: "The obsession to kill since I was a kid, with age became more realistic".
Enron catered for that obsession, writing in its annual report that it was "laser-focused on earnings-per-share growth".
Despite its abrupt finale, Little Sister Death is a chilling meditation on the craft of writing and writerly obsession.
She and her friends simply organized themselves and started writing about their obsessions.
