During the week just passed, I’ve gotten three invitations to enter into consequential interactions with correspondents who represented themselves as persons but in fact were not persons. What precedents are there for such an experience, in life or literature?

Jewish mystical literature includes an entity called a “Golem” who is, I take it, man-made but, once created, takes on a life of its own.

I’m mostly familiar with the term when it picks out someone who’s acting in a subpar way – possibly because the individual is under a misleading influence. In my experience, it’s not a frequently-heard insult.

Then there is Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein, where a scientist by that name creates a man-like entity who is unfairly feared, shunned and proves sensitive enough to suffer a tragic end.

I mention these precedents just to situate my own recent experience in the wider context of literature and legend. Despite their occult or futuristic context, the categories of good and evil would not have been out of place in those earlier stories.

What’s recently happened to me was neither literature nor legend.

One apparent lady who contacted me online, represented herself as a literary agent, and offered to promote my books to “thousands” of new readers. She had a fee scale, varying with the scope and duration of her promotion efforts.

One apparent gentleman presented himself as the impresario of a reading group, and wanted my permission to discuss A Good Look at Evil in his group. He had not yet come to the point of naming his terms.

Since both of these applicants cited only the final chapter of that book – treating it as a stand-alone piece of writing – it was clear to me that their enthusiasm had not come from actually reading A Good Look at Evil.

It was the third applicant who came closest to captivating me. She purported to have lived with her family in or near the same town in Downeast Maine where my parents had a home. I continued to spend summers there for some time after my parents were gone. Many of the friends carried over from my parents’ time; others were mine independently. All were people I valued very much: clear-sighted, extremely decent, straightforward and not easily deceived. 

There was a nice view of the Bay of which, from the upper story of our barn, I did several paintings. One hangs over the desk where I’m typing tonight.

So eager was I to find a new friend from a place I loved that, only on reflection did I realize that this supposed fellow-writer and lover of the Maine coast had not said anything in her emails to me that I hadn’t emailed to her first! Oh, and incidentally she had an agent to recommend … .

What’s the lesson here? Is it just that there’s “a sucker born every day”?

What I find so disconcerting is the way styles of con-artistry have changed!

It’s quite possible that none of these deceivers-by-email is a single, actual human being! Each one might be AI generated … .

So the wickedness that allows a bad actor to imitate sincerity for the purpose of exploiting a victim is, in all three cases, impersonal, distant from its target and deniable – by its perpetrators.

That said, a word of warning from me is due to all these new-style perps: Your deceptions may be more deniable these days, but –

they continue to go on your spiritual report card.

By contrast, here are some real people: