Author Behind Bars

He’s the author of two books, A Revelation of Valentine Love: How to Find the Right Spouse and Female Managers and Their Problems. But problems are now something that Festus Oguhebe knows firsthand, as he was sentenced last month to two years in prison for child abuse. A business professor at Mississippi’s Alcorn State University, Oguhebe was arrested after punishing one of his six children for an infraction by tying up the 11-year-old boy, placing him in a bathtub, pepper-spraying his eyes, penis and buttocks, and covering his body with ants. His defense was that such forms of discipline are customary in his native Nigeria. According to theTimes of Nigeria, Oguhebe was sentenced “despite emotional pleas by two of his children and his ex-wife” and “may lose his job too.” The professor’s “children spoke of their love and respect for him, urging [Judge L. Breland] Hilburn to spare their father jail time.... Anna Oguhebe and her brother, Festus Jr., also a high school senior, said ... his discipline and guidance as a father have kept them out of the kind of the trouble they see peers getting into.” Oguhebe said of America, “The devil wants to destroy this nation.” It was the author’s second brush with the law on child-abuse charges. He told a reporter for Jackson, Mississippi TV station WAPT: that “children must be spanked at times, and he believes too many parents in America are afraid to discipline their children for fear they'll be arrested. ‘If you whip your child and put a bruise, that becomes a crime,’ Oguhebe said. ‘Unfortunately, go to the Ibo land of Africa and you don't see kids behave this way.’”

Meanwhile, the past rainy week has been spent reading a pre-pub galley of Susan Hill‘s The Various Haunts of Men, set for an April 2007 US release from Overlook. This rich and engaging mystery novel by the popular British author of some thirty books, including such bestsellers as The Woman in Black and I’m the King of the Castle, was released in the UK in 2004. In which case maybe you’ve already read it — this tale of a serial killer with excellent surgical skills, told rather masterfully as it leaps from the mind of one character to the mind of another, but sticking mainly with young sleuth Freya Graffham, a choral singer who thinks she’s in love. Now, the following is a spoiler. If you don’t like spoilers, you’ve been warned. Back away. Now. But here’s the thing: Hill kills off Graffham, her main character, at the end of the book. She build up an enormous sympathy between her readers and this character, to the point where you imagine a whole future series featuring Freya Graffham, and she spares no detail in exploring the sleuth’s inner and outer worlds. Then Hill brutally offs her. One can see the authorial glee here, in a way, the sense of I-gotcha satisfaction which makes the book’s denouement that much more wrenching. But killing off major characters is a moral issue. And Dibs! feels that somehow, deep down, it’s just wrong.