Prologue
All
of us have witnessed the spectacle of blood, and we know that the
experience is something which, to varying degrees, imparts to us feelings of
dread, fascination, discomfiture, mystery and even terror or horror. However
much we try to overlook or normalize the experience, the sight of blood always
invites a moment of disequilibrium. Perhaps this is because we know that life’s
equilibrium depends on blood, and so, to see blood is to find oneself reminded
of the tenuousness of existence.
—From the keynote address by Jonathan Wender to the 2006 Western Society of Criminology.
