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The Killer Inside Us: Why serial killer novels continue to fascinate
by Justin M. Norton Sheriff Lou Ford first found his way into the American imagination in an unheralded 1952 novel called The Killer Inside Me. Well, things haven't quite been the same on bookshelves since he took up killing.
The lonesome and laconic redneck wasn't just a shitty cop who killed people out of frustration, although he certainly was consumed by more than the routine stress of living. Ford was also a forefather of one of our ugliest yet most enduring literary characters: the serial killer.
If you don't remember the classic Jim Thompson pulp it goes like
this: A Texas sheriff who once did something very bad to a 3-year-old
(we never know what exactly) gets through life by acting completely
sane. Much like real-life serial killer John Wayne Gacy, Ford is
considered a role model and asset to the community.
All the while, the body count continues to rise...
Unlike Robert Bloch's Psycho killer Norman Bates, Ford wasn't a secluded threat hiding out in a hotel, benignly waiting for victims to present themselves. He was a palpable evil force on the loose dissolving the fabric of his town.
Since The Killer Inside Mewas published in 1952, the exponential rise in serial killers in America has seemed to mirror their canonization in horror and suspense literature. Actually, though, the serial killer became a literary archetype long before killers were accorded superstar status on CNN and Court TV. Television and newspapers have only just caught on in the quest to plumb killers' backgrounds for a nugget of insight into crimes. Authors have done the same things for decades, if not longer.
Intimate Details About Ultimate Pariahs
In the subgenre of serial killer novels, readers have long been able
to learn intimate details about ultimate pariahs -- child killers,
leather-bar stalkers (see Gerald Walker's Cruising and amoral lust killers like James Ellroy's Martin Plunkett in Killer On the Road (also called Silent Terror). Just as varied as their reasons for killing and maiming is their choice of weapons. Fictional serial slayers have used machetes, guns, pitchforks and bare hands. Much like the slasher films of the 80s, the arsenal seems varied and the firepower endless.
The number of cult and best selling novels based on serial killers
has scared the hell out of people who assume violent novels are a sign
of the end of civilization. But people don't just come to serial killer
novels for a voyeuristic thrill or to be entertained -- although that is
often the case. They also come to explore the dark side of their soul so
it doesn't consume them. They come to meet characters that tell us more
about the netherworld of our souls more than much of classic literature
ever could.
They come to the books to learn about the monster in all of us and
often leave infused with a stronger sense of morality
By the third movie, the diabolical Jason Vorhees had become more of
a caricature than a frightening killer hiding his demonic rage behind a
cheap hockey mask -- but the novel brought me closer to something I both
feared and longed to understand. I read, enraptured, as my friend
played video games -- far more interested than I had been by Forever,
Judy Blume's novel of teenage sex angst.
The 1980s were a cultural heyday for American serial killers, and my
parents couldn't have been any less pleased. Starting with the Friday
the 13th movies and Halloween, America went on a ten-year bloodbath that primarily took place on screen. I was fascinated, and often went
over to an friend's house to watch slasher classics such as Slumber
Party Massacre, where an escaped mental patient with an affinity for a
giant drill dispatches buxom babes and Silent Night Deadly Night. In
that notorious film, the killer wears a Santa Claus outfit and upsets
conservative families with his clothing selections.
Oddly, seeing fewer of these movies increased my fascination with
crime and serial killers in particular. While my friends laughed
through each episode of carnage at Camp Crystal Lake I mentally relived and rehashed every scene from the movie in my head -- each
perfectly-timed shot from a harpoon gun, each well-placed puncture wound and each night of teenage lust doomed by the blade. The fear was more real and intense because the subject was taboo in my
Catholic family. I was forced to look at the scenes with intense fear;
they became utterly real. Unlike the kids who were able to pass off the
latest slasher flick as an episode in high comedy, I thought that normal
people could and did turn into serial killers.
It was a long time before I got to the novels, but I didn't forget
how scared I had been.
In 1991, I found James Ellroy's novel Silent Terror, on the back
of a mystery shelf in a used bookstore. The novel was plugged as an
authentic exploration of the mind of a serial killer.
Ellroy's stark, powerful and uncompromising look at a serial killer
was unlike anything I had ever read. The novel was graphic and bleak,
yet somehow infused with the author's unique sense of black humor.
Ellroy doesn't talk about the book much anymore but I still think it's
one of his best early novels.
Martin Plunkett, who seems to love the fact that he is helplessly
evil, goes on a murderous rampage that is partially retold by snippets
from true-crime magazines.
Ellroy doesn't hold back. We learn every visceral detail of
Plunkett's murders. There is nothing Ellroy won't tell you -- and little
left to wonder about by the end of the book.
About the same time brat-pack novelist Bret Easton Ellis published
American Psycho, which was recently made into a movie. The novel offended practically everyone in America so, of course, I had to buy it.
The novel is, indeed, a standout book. Killer is possibly the most
realistic of all serial killer novels; it manages to be horrifying
through subtlety and innuendo. What makes the novel seem so real is that
Lou Ford doesn't appear to be aware that what he's doing is evil and
depraved. He progresses through the book explaining his crimes in the
same monotone voice, never hinting at fear or genuine remorse. Ford is a
one-of-a-kind character, simultaneously unforgettable and unknowable
because so little of any of his real traits are revealed. The novel is
an unstoppable page-turner and a true classic.
Insight Into Insanity
On the same level was Shane Stevens' By Reason of Insanity.
which explored all of the 80s killer cliches long before slasher movies
spawned endless sequels. Thomas Bishop is a lost and tortured soul who
kills his mother -- but unlike Martin Plunkett he ends up in a mental
institution. When he is released, the killing spree starts in earnest.
While the insight into madness in this novel certainly isn't as good
as other genre books, the novel works well in so many other areas. It's
almost like the War and Peace of serial killer novels, extremely long,
endlessly exploring side angles and characters and meticulously plotted.
The main character is also unforgettable: Bishop is unquestionably one
of the smartest and most resourceful of fictional serial killers.
Stevens is at his best when he shows how Bishop's mind works and how he
escapes crime scenes and maintains his anonymity.
Silence of The Lambs by Thomas Harris is, of course, a classic -- but
I won't dwell on it because it is well-known. Rex Miller's pulp novels
based on the 300-plus pound killer Chaingang are fun reads that actually
make readers sympathize with the bad guy -- who loves dogs and morphs into an anti-hero in the fourth book to battle a crazed Naziesque
doctor. Poppy Z. Brite's excellent Exquisite Corpse is as much an
extended allegory on the AIDS virus as it is a novel on serial killers.
I have many more to read.
I'm still scared of serial killers and wonder why more people don't
become them, but I still look for books on the subject.
Apparently, I'm not alone. Serial killer novels are coming out
non-stop, many of them solid, a lot of them tripe. The walls of most
retail book stores feature a solid roster of the books, many featuring
the all-too-familiar cover of a large kitchen knife dripping blood and
showing a reflection of a half-naked woman.
I still look for books on the subject, but I look for the good ones.
The ones with the outlandish covers usually don't make the cut.
And no, reading these books has not turned me into any of he
monsters I feared as a child and probably never well, contrary to what
the Christian Right and the censors believe.
It has, however, been an education into something that consumes our
culture yet is so seldom explored or talked about in depth. Many people
will sit in front of the television watching days of a trial like the
Yellowstone slaying cases or Andrew Cunanan and then look down at
someone on the train reading a crime novel. It doesn't make sense,
especially when you consider that there is still a hefty divide between
fiction and reality (except on MTV).
If anything, these novels have given me a healthy respect for the
evil we are capable of -- and reminded to look over my shoulder and
definitely avoid hitchhikers.
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Throughout Thompson's tightly-written book, we see Ford lose his
grip on sanity, all the while addressing the reader as if he were just
changing the oil in his car. The surprise ending is almost too much to
stomach -- much like the discovery of rotted bodies and parts of corpses in the crawl space under Gacy's Chicago-area home was a grim ending to the horrific spree of one of America's worst killers
The first serial killer novel I read certainly wasn't a classic -- it
was a pulp novelization of Friday the 13th Part 3 that my friend's
father purchased in the hopes that his son would start reading. Anything
with words in the English language would suffice.
I'd already read some Dostoyevsky and was looking for something
modern that touched on the timeless search for the root of evil. But I
didn't want to read dumbed-down novels meant to provoke readers or scare
people who live in remote farming towns.
It wasn't until after reading Ellis and a few lesser killer novels
that I found Thompson. After an introduction to his work with The
Grifters, After Dark My Sweet, and Cropper's Cabin, I finally read what
many people considered Thompson's best -- The Killer Inside Me.