Irreconcilable indifference: Gary Indiana talks about taking his cues from true crime in writing his mordant new novel, Depraved Indifference. (books).

Gary Indiana seems to have forged a literary career from the gay dregs of life. In his lacerating social satire Resentment, a hapless homosexual journalist covers the court case of two brothers (modeled after Erik and Lyle Menendez) who murdered their sexually abusive father. In his following book, Three Month Fever, a serial-killing gay golem (Andrew Cunanan) reveals the twisted machinations of his mind.

But now it's the straight sociopaths' turn. With Depraved Indifference, his fifth novel and the final book in his "American crime trilogy," the openly gay Indiana follows the peregrinations of an incestuous mother-and-son team of grifters. "This is my revenge on heterosexuality," the impish author playfully gloats.

Depraved Indifference was born of the creepy case of Sante and Kenneth Kimes, the mother-and-son con artists convicted of murdering heiress Irene Silverman. The novel stars the Kimeses' fictional doppelgangers, busty party gal Evangeline Slote and her thug son, Devin, "handsome in a chiseled, frigid, almost corny way, like an ice sculpture at a cheesy wedding." Yet the story's emotional center is Evangeline's boozy husband, Warren Slote, a soul-ravaged World War II veteran.

"When I started writing the book, [Warren] took over," the 50-year-old Indiana says. "I'm a child of that Depression-era, World War II generation, and having been exposed to the posttraumatic effects of World War II through out my youth, I got so sick of hearing about the `greatest generation.' This was the greatest generation of alcoholics and dysfunctional fathers."

Despite his latest novel's true-crime correlations, Indiana emphasizes it's an imaginative work of fiction. "Almost all of the characters in this book are invented out of pure cloth," he says. "What attracted me to this stow, more than the Kimeses' characters, was the whole phenomenon of shell corporations, credit card fraud, identity theft--all things that have entered our lives in the past several years but which people haven't been paying much attention to, although September 11 may have changed that."

Indiana says the trilogy's common theme is the media's increasingly blurred boundaries between fact and fiction. "We now have a media culture that routinely misrepresents reality to us, whether it's a profile of Tom Cruise or a network news show," says the veteran journalist. "So I realized that whatever I came up with was just as plausible as anything that would be reported. For me, what links the Menendez brothers, Cunanan, and Sante Kimes is a real internal emptiness. Some gap formed at such an early age, at such a pivotal moment, nothing can fill it."

Yet for someone whose "brilliant" talent The New York Times described as astonishing in its "absurdist bleakness," Indiana is surprisingly not sour on humanity. "The way we now live allows us to easily dehumanize each other," he says. "But I've seen ordinary people exhibit extraordinary kindness, helpfulness, and generosity of spirit in distressful situations. This is sappy to say, but I really believe that empathy can change the world."

Find more on Gary Indiana and links to related Internet sites at www.advocate.com

Bahr writes for The New York Times, Us Weekly, and Interview.