Insane in the brain

'The true story of a 17th century Hungarian Countess who bathed in the blood of girls... Descended from one of the most ancient aristocratic families of Europe, Erzsébet Báthory bore the psychotic aberrations of centuries of intermarriage. From adolescence she indulged in sadistic lesbian fantasies, where only the spilling of a woman's blood could satisfy her urges. By middle age, she had regressed to a mirror-fixated state of pathalogical necro-sadism involving witchcraft, torture, blood-drinking, cannibalism and, inevitably wholescale slaughter. (...) The Bloody Countess is Valentine Penrose's disturbing case history of a female psychopath which has an unequalled power to evoke the decadent melancholy of doomed, delinquent aristocracy in a dark age of superstition.' - from Amazon.co.uk

My reading for the next weeks is this book, nicely purchased in Lisbon's annual Book Fair, under an annual scorching sun. The most awful crimes of humanity happen in the brain, Oscar Wilde wrote, and if you're a healthy person, that's where they'll stay. If you're mentally ill, as this countess probably was, you practice what you preach and go around being a criminal. It'll be interesting to know how one is a female criminal in 17th century Hungary. There are so many interesting things to learn in this world indeed!

Anyway, I'm reading this book and I'm wondering why normal, balanced human beings have the tendency to stop and look every time there's an accident on the road. We hate evil but it attracts us as well.

As for me, I just take an interest in mental illness and crime. If I can learn about it while reading a well written, well researched book about something that is not very discussed as it is, which is female crime, then it's even better. This so-called bloody Countess is also described as having been a female Dracula, which is a character that has provided excuses for all sorts of psychiatric or psychological theories and diseases anyway (homossexuality, sifilis, incest, repressed sexual desire, you name it, Dracula embodies it). I don't know why these things interest me, but they just do. I guess it's because of the Oscar Wilde sentence, and also because, in reality and in all probability, mental health doesn't actually exist.