The demons that haunt Mary Gaitskill's stories

Marie Gaitskill has built her career by writing about outsiders, people who are wounded, damaged, self-destructive - most notably I guess in her story Secretary, made into a pretty good movie, about a depressed young woman who's seriously into cutting (I think that was emphasized more in the movie than the story, not sure) and a recent novel about a self-destructive fashion model (?). She keeps developing this particular metier, and her stories from the very first to the most recent are generally depressive and unpleasant but in some peculiar way compelling, too - you have to pay attention to them, in the same way that you can't not look at a car wreck - and then you're glad you're moving along and it's not you in the wreckage. Her story in the current New Yorker, The Other World, is fairly typical of her work, though a little more ambitious in narrative style than some of her earlier stories: narrated by a man who describes his obviously disturbed son, the son obsessed with pictures of guns for example, but the man keeps making light of the disturbance - we see a broader picture than the narrator does, as in some of Ishigura's work. Gradually, story becomes more about the man himself, as he in the coolest imaginable tones describes his murder fantasies, his thoughts of violence against women, some of the creepy behavior he engaged in as a child, and ending with his bonding with his son - the torch has been passed, so to speak. Typically Gaitskill: a believable character, but one we wouldn't want to know, one we feel no sympathy for, one that makes us wonder what really draws her to these demons?