David Grann

And this character who happens to be also identified as Chris, the same Chris like the way the phone had been auctioned off, the narrator's name is Chris, who goes on this grisly kind of rampage in the novel, indulging in sex, and eventually ends up murdering the girl, his girlfriend in the novel.

And so as Jacek is reading the novel,

He suddenly notices certain details that catch his attention.

One of those details is that the victim of this murder, the girlfriend, had a noose around her neck.

So he pauses on that.

And then he finds one other detail that really strikes him.

And that is that the murderer, Chris, in the novel, had also not only put a noose around his girlfriend, had also stabbed the girlfriend and then sold her.

the knife used in the killing in the novel, on an internet auction site.

Because Christian was very charming, very bright.

And so like his philosophy teachers and philosophy friends were quite shocked by it.

But it is important to understand that many people found Christian mesmerizing.

I mean, there was something very alluring about him.

He was brooding, smoking cigarettes.

He kind of created this character.

And so even in his own life, he would kind of tell these stories that you never were quite sure what was true or what was false.

He would tell people he'd gone on some adventure, had some romance, or he was at a brothel where he debased himself.

And if people would repeat it several times, he would say, ah, it's become true.

It was always in Christian, both in the novel, but also in his own life, this play between what is real and what is false, what is true and what is a fiction.

And in the character in the novel,

Was that Christian, or was that just a character he created in a novel?