25/11/2018 “Life After Death,” by Damien Echols - The New York Times

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Freedom After Fire Ants and Tumult

“Life After Death,” by Damien Echols
By JANET MASLIN SEPT. 19, 2012
Eighteen and a half years after he was sentenced to death for participating in the
murders of three 8-year-old boys in Arkansas, Damien Echols finds himself in
Faireyland. Mr. Echols’s new book, “Life After Death,” has a Shepard Fairey-
inspired cover design that’s as coolly lionizing as Mr. Fairey’s “Hope” poster for
President Obama. The book has a champion in Johnny Depp, who has compared
Mr. Echols’s writing to Dostoyevsky’s. And his story is the subject of a
forthcoming documentary, “West of Memphis,” even though that story has been
exhaustively told in the three “Paradise Lost” films that paved the path to Mr.
Echols’s release from death row.

These are mind-bending new circumstances for a guy who grew up as an

impoverished loner, sardonically described himself as white trash, and spent his
years of incarceration noticing the most grotesque, dehumanizing aspects of
prison life. Yet “Life After Death” tries to reconcile all these extremes into a single
narrative, and to a great extent it accomplishes this magic trick. By the way, Mr.
Echols spells that word “magick,” just as one of his favorite writers, the very
spooky Aleister Crowley, did. It was Mr. Echols’s teenage taste for the occult,
heavy metal and black clothing — a look inspired by Mr. Depp in “Edward
Scissorhands,” he says — that initially made him a target for the vindictive and
provincial police in West Memphis, Ark.
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“Life After Death” does not discuss the details of that triple murder case and
the long, botched investigation and trial that followed. For one thing, that story is
not over. Last summer Mr. Echols, now 37, and his two cohorts in what became
known as the West Memphis Three, Jason Baldwin and Jessie Misskelley Jr.,
were freed on an Alford plea, an unusual technicality whereby the defendants
were released but not vindicated. The accumulated fan support, financial backing
and legal muscle that have rallied around Mr. Echols suggest that his champions
will continue to fight on his behalf.

But he is sick of that story anyway. So “Life After Death” is a dual memoir,
partly about Mr. Echols’s boyhood and partly about his prison life. He says that
he wants this to be a beautiful book and not a freak show, but there is
freakishness at every turn. Yes, one of Mr. Echols’s childhood memories involves
watching “Captain Kangaroo.” But another, much more typical one describes how
he was agonizingly attacked by fire ants while his grandfather sipped beer and
chuckled. Something else he remembers: his stepfather’s punching the family
Chihuahua with a closed fist.

“Nothing lifts my spirits like a scarecrow in the front yard,” he writes, with as
much nostalgia as he can summon for his tough and tumultuous upbringing. He
likes horror films and horror novels because they remind him of home. And he
describes the horrific living conditions, in a shack without water or electricity but
with crop dusters spraying overhead, that his family took for granted. Even so,
these memories constitute Mr. Echols’s idea of living in freedom.

And they make good stories, even if this book’s emphasis is often on filth,
hellishness and disgust. They are so well told that “Life After Death” sometimes
sounds like the work of a ghostwriter. But the book reprints enough handwritten
pages of Mr. Echols’s prison writing to make it very clear that the literary talent is
entirely his. He was still in the ninth grade at the age of 17, but he is an autodidact
who read thousands of books while incarcerated. And, as the documentary
footage of his arrest and trial make clear, he is someone with a strong, single-
minded personal style.

The mere fact of his survival in prison becomes more miraculous as his death row
stories unfold. Sometimes he was entirely isolated. Sometimes he was surrounded
4by people he regarded as demonstrably insane, and their bizarre behavior is well
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documented here. (Especially memorable: a man with crickets Scotch-taped all
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over his body.) Mr. Echols makes a fiercely persuasive case against the execution
of prisoners not lucid enough to understand what is being done to them. He cites
one man who expected to finish eating his piece of pie after his execution.

Even in moments of deepest despair Mr. Echols found ways to toughen

himself. And they are not the usual methods found in prison memoirs. “I was
much more flexible in mind and body as a youth,” he writes, about the difficulty
of absorbing each new horror. But he developed a strong spirituality. He fell in
love and got married. (He has much to say about his wife, Lorri, who had no
reason to think he would ever be free when their courtship began.) And he
already had the advantage of an odd perspective, one that found happiness in
dark winter nights and extreme physical conditions. “Today my feet bled through
two pairs of socks,” he writes. “It was bliss.”

Mr. Echols’s prison story is not consistent in tone. As he wrote in an earlier,

self-published book, “Almost Home,” which is partly incorporated here, he felt
hopeless and ghostly for a long time. That’s the mood early in “Life After Death,”
but he gradually begins seeing glints of light. He learns that Axl Rose has been
spotted in a West Memphis Three T-shirt. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, prompted
by “Paradise Lost,” tries to get in touch with Mr. Echols’s lawyer (who at first
doesn’t recognize Mr. Vedder’s name). And Peter Jackson brings his “Lord of the
Rings” clout to aiding the defense effort for Mr. Echols. Mr. Jackson, a producer
of “West of Memphis,” helped pay for the DNA testing that helped persuade the
State of Arkansas to back off.

Now Mr. Echols, who may love heavy metal but cites a Medici as a role
model, is a free man with his own celebrity aura. He has written a haunting book,
and the story it tells is hardly over. He is living out a sequel that is no less strange
and magickal than what he has already been through.

LIFE AFTER DEATH

By Damien Echols

Illustrated. 399 pages. Blue Rider Press. $26.95.

A version of this review appears in print on September 20, 2012, on Page C2 of the New York edition
with the headline: Freedom After Fire Ants and Tumult.

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