He also brought his prison values with him to cheat, to steal, or to rape were as inconsequential and natural as breathing. And now, in his newfound parole freedom, his volatility became a weapon that terrorized others and let him get his own way. But he'd been an emotional child, we learn from flashbacks, boorishly insensitive to the effect of his instant explosions on others. Self-educated, Gilmore had a nice vocabulary, a definite drawing talent, and a knack for writing he exercised regularly and was generally fearless. He was paroled when his cousin Brenda guaranteed him a home and a job. Here, we follow him from his release on parole from the federal penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, in April 1976 to his execution at Utah State Prison in January 1977, a nine-month period in which Gilmore spent only four months flee.

Before his death at 36, Gilmore had spent all but four years of his adolescent/adult life in jail. Indeed, the tone, the voice, the man himself seem at first entirely gone, until we notice how vividly the figure of Gilmore dominates every page as he manipulates the world from his jail cell it's as if Mailer, always his own existential hero, has found one with even stronger credentials. Hello, relentlessly objective Invisible Norman. Goodbye, self-advertising, two-fisted clown-drunk Mailer. The life story of double-murderer Gary Gilmore and a new, impressive book for Mailer, a thousand-page leviathan achieved at an awesome price.

The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer