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Those Who Trespass type Book genre Mystery

Thriller

Following Bill O’Reilly being dismissed by Fox News, a 1998 novel about a murderous television host written by O’Reilly has resurfaced.

Titled Those Who Trespass: A Novel of Television and Murder, the book presents an Irish-American TV news host named Shannon Michaels who begins stalking and murdering his colleagues after he is fired. A New Yorker piece on O’Reilly described the book as “a revenge fantasy, and it displays extraordinarily violent impulses,” going on to say that “O’Reilly describes each of these killings — the careful planning, the suffering of the victim, the act itself — in loving detail.”

Some of the murders within Trespass include the killing of a fellow veteran TV correspondent with a spoon through the roof of the mouth; throwing the woman who forced his resignation off a balcony; drowning a television research consultant by burying him neck-deep at the beach; and slitting the throat of the station manager at a convention.

Violence is not the only vice present in the novel; there are also several detailed passages relating a sexual encounter between the murderous protagonist and colleague Ashley Van Buren.

The reception of the novel was middling — Salon reported that “Kirkus Reviews calls the language ‘wooden’; one could stick to the simpler adjective ‘bad.’ Within the first 10 pages, for example, we’re treated to ‘the clouds were assembling in the west,’ ‘[h]is intense sexual hunger was apparent to anyone who bothered to notice,’ and ‘he did what he usually did when gratification eluded him — he got unpleasant.'”

Those interested in reading Those Who Trespass can find it on Amazon.

O’Reilly’s current publisher, Henry Holt, which publishes books in his Killing series, has stated that its plans around future O’Reilly books have not changed.