Gaitskill reads a chilling story of a would-be killer for the Visiting Writers Series. (Abby Hocking / Photo Assistant )

Accomplished short story writer, essayist and novelist Mary Gaitskill sent chills through the audience in the Library Auditorium with a reading of her short story “The Other Place” on Thursday,  April 21.

The quiet, clear voice of the writer kept listeners hanging on to her every word during the event, which was sponsored by ink.

Gaitskill’s “The Other Place” begins with the male narrator describing his young son who, like him, has a strong fascination with violence. The narrator then relates stories from his own childhood.

“Mostly I just wanted to sit and watch, to touch other people’s things, to drink in their lives,” Gaitskill read.

Coming from a broken family with only a few friends, the narrator quickly realizes he is not like other young men.

“I started to get excited about girls being hurt. Or killed … It was like porn,” the story read.

The narrator begins to enter a world he calls “the other place” where he can “sometimes passively (watch) a killer and other times (become) one.”

Although at first the narrator never imagines killing anyone he actually knows, this changes when he meets an irritating college girl. He returns to the college campus looking for her, then resorts to following any loner girls.

“I’d feel the other place running against the membrane of the world but not quite touching it,” the narrator says.

Deciding he must get a victim somewhere private, the narrator obtains a gun and hitchhikes with random women. He eventually finds a lonely woman in her 40s and attempts to force her to drive to an abandoned warehouse.

Instead of fighting back, the woman simply stops the car and tells the man to shoot her.

“The normal place and the other place were turning into the same place,” Gaitskill read, her voice rising for the pivotal moment.

Unable to go through with it, the narrator leaves, throwing away his bullets and gun, claiming that “she was dead already.”

Gaitskill said she showed this story to a therapist who, surprisingly, thought the narrator was troubled but very normal.

“He didn’t see him as a real killer,” she said.

The story ended with the narrator’s haunting conclusion that his son would suffer from the same affliction he does: “Inside him somewhere is the other place. It’s quiet now but I know it’s there.”