ARTHUR CROSSHAIR, INFAMOUS AUTHOR OF BOOK BOUND IN OWN SKIN, DIES AT 68
First published in the West Iowan Times, May 21, 2031
Editor’s Note: The below article, reprinted in full, originally appeared in the West Iowan Times, a news website based out of Sioux City, Iowa.
ARTHUR CROSSHAIR, INFAMOUS AUTHOR OF BOOK BOUND IN OWN SKIN, DIES AT 68
First published in the West Iowan Times, May 21, 2031
By Annabel DeVania, Special to the West Iowan Times
Arthur Crosshair, a bestselling author and amateur anatomist who gained notoriety for binding a book in skin removed from his torso, died on Tuesday in his Doon home. He was 68.
Mr. Crosshair’s literary representative, Commander Sond Associates, announced the death, saying it was of natural causes. “Despite breaking his ankle in February,” the agency said, “Arthur was in excellent health until a recent decline. He was in no pain at the time of his death.”
No pain is novel for the macabre novelist. The once-celebrated author and “aspiring skin-binder,” as radio host Larry King called him in an infamous interview, first achieved acclaim for his 1999 book, “The Point of the Needle,” which was published by Hachette (in traditional form). Well-received upon publication, the novel – about a reformed prisoner tracking down a carnivorous killer – was a hit. It spent 25 weeks as a New York Times Bestseller and made many Best-Of-Year lists.
West Iowan Times critic Brooks Sederberg, reviewing “The Point of the Needle” the year it came out, described the book as “Harris’ The Silence of the Lambs meets Zylan’s Escape the Ocean Floor, but with a pugnaciously delightful indifference to human under-suffering. It’s as if the skin-suited Buffalo Bill wore his victims alive or the Shark of Monterey used his teeth-necklace to kill and consume, not just detect and hollow out. Crosshair’s skill, solidly grounded in characterization and plotting, thrives when turning phrases of the decidedly indelicate.”
The author biography in the book was curious and portending. It read, simply, “Arthur Crosshair writes of the horrors of bodies. Cape Feare is his favorite episode of The Simpsons. Omnia quae sunt ut cutis tenetur.”
“The Point of the Needle” was adapted into a 2004 film directed by Damian Mintz-Cashel, one of the few by the icon not to be nominated for an Academy Award. Reviews were harsh.
Literary success caught Crosshair unexpected at age 36, and the decade that followed was marked by eccentric reports and bizarre appearances. Shortly after the film adaptation of “The Point of the Needle” was announced, Crosshair created an internet video series called “Lunar Writing.” He filmed himself wearing an astronaut’s suit, seated at a desk on the moon while conducting menial writing tasks, Earth a distant speck in the background. Seven “episodes” of the series aired; six were unremarkable, but the seventh contained a bit of Crosshair theater. The writer spent twenty minutes working at his moon desk before removing his space helmet, at which point he faked his own death, in a slobbering manner, exactly as it would occur from hypoxia, or the sudden vacuum of oxygen human lungs encounter in space sans tank. Special effects were utilized to make his “death” appear grotesque and convincing.
A year to the day later, he appeared on Late Night with David Letterman dressed as Lamp Shade (alias Dorl Haaket), the serial killer from “Needle,” down to the whirling blades cinching his sides. On air, he presented Letterman with a large present in a Macy’s Bag. Slabbed between newspapers was what appeared to be a human leg. Crosshair claimed it was real, and the broadcast ended as police and paramedics rushed to the Ed Sullivan Theater. Crosshair was detained before admitting the leg was a prop re-fashioned from a deer carcass. Four days later, during a self-proclaimed “Exploratory Apology Appearance” on Larry King Live, Crosshair veered from apologizing to discussing trepanning methodologies and the ethics of tattooing bone. King pushed back against Crosshair’s assertions about the “painlessness of auto-goring,” but the veteran radio host was visibly stunned as Crosshair grew increasingly agitated, demanding that King “pull the bones from your fingers to prove you’re not plotting.” As King looked on, mute in horror, Crosshair whipped out a small knife and threated to “de-fing” the host if he wouldn’t voluntarily offer his “king finger, royal royal blue.” Crosshair eventually tossed the knife on the floor and walked off set. (King neglected to press charges, citing concerns for the writer’s well-being.) As a result of this uncanny behavior, Crosshair was dropped from the interview and radio circuit, one of the few entertainers to get “black-boxed” by the biggest cable channels and radio stations of his time.
It was at this time that broad and strange rumors about Crosshair’s personal life started to spread. One claimed he affixed a life-size “angel skeleton” with wings fashioned from femurs to his bedroom ceiling. Another asserted his practice of “autogenetic urine purification,” peeing exclusively into jars he then catalogued and kept under observation, with the belief that something someday would appear in one of them. Others suggested he had two extra ribs, a kind of update to an old urban legend involving Marilyn Manson. Whereas the shock musician was said to have removed a pair of his ribs for autofellative abilities, the myth of Crosshair’s rib-addition was supposedly to encircle an enlarged heart, twice the normal size, which would serve, so to speak, as the ink well for his master work, a magnum opus of one.
In May 2010, Crosshair announced his second book, “The Song of the Skin & Those Under It.” It would be a fictional work of “dark esoterica” printed by the same publisher of his debut. Months before its scheduled release, Crosshair ran an article in these very pages, the only non-fiction article he wrote for a major (or mid-size) paper in his lifetime. “My Explanation” was a 600-word block of text conveying three main points: 1) the author had terminated his contract with Hachette and returned his advance money for book two, 2) the “dark esoterica” manuscript he’d been working on was destroyed in favor of a new story of “egoithic perversions” that would retain the same title, and 3), most notoriously, the new edition of “The Song of the Skin & Those Under It” would be written with ink fashioned from Crosshair’s blood, on parchment made from his skin. He admitted he’d already started the process of tanning, soaking, and scraping the “hide,” that is, dried-out pieces of skin he’d had removed from his belly. As Crosshair infamously ended “My Explanation”: “A book on the corruptions of the human soul should have a corrupt human covering.”
Anthropodermic bibliopegy, or the practice of binding books in human flesh, is a rare but known phenomenon. About 50 such books exist in libraries and collections around the world, but there are no known cases of self-effacing anthropodermic bibliopegy prior to Crosshair.
Crosshair’s announcement was met with shock and revulsion. Many characterized the author as a “skin-exciser” undermining the dignity of the human body. Others saw his actions as completely acceptable and in line with the “Altered Anatomy” movement: “his body, his choice.” Crosshair’s behavior opened national conversations on mental health and ways to deal with those deemed “Independently Unwell,” as a Time Magazine story characterized Crosshair.
A year to the date after the appearance of “My Explanation,” Crosshair shared two photos to his Social_Artist account. The first showed a small greyish book. Purple words on its cover spelled the title and the author’s name in an elegant hand. The second showed the author’s horribly scarred torso. About the size of an ordinary paperback, Crosshair’s anthropodermic version of “The Song of the Skin & Those Under It” had finally appeared. Accompanying text read, “only copy in exis10nce. as king price. a c∞l miㄥㄥ.” Sotheby’s handled the auction for the single copy of the book, which went for fourteen times Crosshair’s asking price in September 2012. Since then, according to speculators, the value of the book has risen to nearly $30 million.
The sole copy of “The Song of the Skin & Those Under It” is owned by Josh Randall Micraet, a “collector of oddities,” according to the website for Zig Zower, his collector’s shop. Micraet has made a career out of trading artifacts containing “traces of dark esoterica,” which he admitted to “biting from [Crosshair’s] original classification of Song of Skin, the destroyed version.” Micraet told The New York Times in 2028 that he’d turned the thirty pages of the book only twice, but its “terrifying tale of tactile hallucinatory transcendence” was tattooed in his memory.
Arthur Jakub Crosshair was born in 1963 in Harlem, New York, to a sixteen-year-old sex worker named Bertha Warbles, according to one of the seven (and a half) interviews he gave in his lifetime. He never knew his father. Crosshair studied anatomy at Columbia University and upon graduation worked as a Manhattan street cleaner. It was during this time that he wrote “The Point of the Needle.” After its publication, Crosshair left New York for the Midwest, settling first in Des Moines, and later Doon. He never married and was rarely seen in the company of anyone other than his sister, who he remained close with until her death in 2006.
According to Commander Sond Associates, Crosshair left plans in his will for a third book to be published in as many editions as his skin and blood would allow, although it’s unclear at this time if those wishes will be carried out.
Crosshair’s dying words were purported to be “All that exists exists to be skin bound,” showcasing an obsession, down to his last breath, with the epidermis and the word.