The last time I encountered Erik Hofstatter, his keen eye and wickedly vicious words were dwelling on the House of Borgia’s controversial reputation across the 15th and 16th centuries in his volume Bankrupting Sky Banks (Aqueduct Press, 2025). Now, Hofstatter has leapt forward in time to the significantly more recent, but remarkably lesser known mass slaughter that gripped Indonesia across late 1965 – early 1966.
The newly-founded nation had been ruled since independence by President Sukarno who engaged in ever-increasing levels of authoritarianism to tamp down on regular regional rebellions. In response to a foiled coup on 1 October 1965, the army, local militias and religious organisations carried out a bloody wholesale purge of anyone deemed to be associated with the local communist movement — with the US government remaining silent despite significant knowledge of what was taking place, as well as CIA ties to the organisers.
Ultimately, around 1.5 million people were imprisoned, a minimum of half-a-million to 1 million butchered, with General Suharto — a leader of the purge — then seizing the office of the President, which he would retain for three decades. The highly praised documentary The Act Of Killing (2012), in which death squad members spoke of their actions then performed strange reenactments and reinterpretations of their actions, brought the events to greater prominence in the West, but much remains suppressed and unknown.
Hofstatter dives directly into the bloodshed. ‘It’s a cheaper high to cut a communist. Easy to obtain too. Just point a finger, say the word.'”‘ There’s a dream world aspect to his poetry that draws to mind the increasingly wide-eyed, deranged Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now as the mundane and the fantastical, the atavistic rising through the tools of modernity, the violently deranged and the softly sensual blurs into a hair-trigger flickering of flashed moments.
The central narrator weaves between cigarette breaks, the torture of civilians, hints at unleashed vengeance upon the memory of past lovers, the officialdom and formality of state-sanctioned murder, names of future victims leaked by press contacts, profiteering from the violence… ‘Then break them. Like a piggy bank. Get at the sweet cash inside.’ It’s a continuous whirl of spectacular squalor and atrocity.
Nowhere is there remorse. Most perpetrators of the violence lived out their lives safely and comfortably, rose high in society or fell to its margins like anyone else in any other third world country in the last decades of the 20th century. But the marks were made, as Hofstatter says: ‘Blood washes away. Bodies get buried. But ghosts stay.’ The conventional Western desire for sackcloth and ashes, for public self-denunciation of one’s sins, has no place in what occurred nor in this volume. Instead, quietly or in sudden heart-stopping shocks, the dead rear up against their killers in private, personal moments.
The volume avoids anything so comforting as a straight narrative in which the killer ends their life in a state of atonement or a steady wave of nightmares. Instead, the story dips in and out of spectacular horrors, walking on the surface of a sea of blood slicking every vivid moment, saturated to such a deep level there is no such thing as relief. And there is no natural justice beyond what Hofstatter characterises as the chains tying those who killed to those they killed for the rest of their term on Earth. What awaits them after that, who knows?
WRITER
Erik Hofstatter
PUBLISHER
Aqueduct Press
RELEASE
15 July 2026
