Thoughts on I Am Not a Serial Killer

Trigger warning: The books which I am going to talk about may be/are unpleasant and distressing. They deal with domestic violence, serial killers, torture, and mental illness. Read these musings at your own risk.

[See also: Mr. Monster; I Don't Want to Kill You]

I have consumed a lot of media in my life. Fairly recently, not including all the time I spend puttering around reading/watching things on the internet [1], I've seen the Batman trilogy, watched Frozen at the cinema (twice), gone to a college performance of Legally Blonde: The Musical, progressed several hundred pages in The Second Sex, finished a book about non-verbal communication, re-watched Casablanca, skimmed Sabriel...and devoured Dan Well's John Wayne Cleaver series. 

With the series title, these books seem like they'd be sort of daffy: maybe about a movie-star-turned-chef, or a crotchety old man who looks like a Hollywood cowboy. If, however, you clicked on the above clicky-link, you will see they are not daffy, they are terrifying. Terrifying and fascinating. 

I don't read horror novels or watch horror movies. Most of my life is spent trying to figure out how to get less stimulation, not more. I don't like staying up late looking for thrills and chills [2]; gore and fright are not what I gravitate towards, entertainment-wise (see above: Frozen, Legally Blonde, Casablanca). These books were recommended to me long ago, but I couldn't stomach them the first time around. But it's a brand-new day, and here I am several years later, needing something to break through my every-contemporary-fiction-book-is-a-trope-filled-annoyance-with-aggravating-characters-and-stupid-plotting malaise. So I asked  K. to lend me again I Am Not a Serial Killer. 

I don't know what I was thinking. 

Before plunging into my rambles about psychological disorders, performing heroics, gore for shock vs. gore for purpose, domestic violence, what is True, and what makes a villain truly terrifying, here's a brief list of things to know about book 1, I Am Not a Serial Killer. 

- John Wayne Cleaver is a 15-year-old diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder (aka, a sociopath)
- His mom and her twin sister are the morticians in their sleepy town
- John is fascinated by serial killers, and knows pretty much everything there is to know about, well, all of them
- Despite the sociopathy, John desperately does not want to be a serial killer, and lives by very strict rules in order to keep his malevolent thoughts and violent actions under tight control
- A serial killer has come to Clayton county, and John is determined to stop it

Remember: Spoilers. 

These books are hard to read. Not in that the words are especially difficult or the sentences especially convoluted, but that for a non-horror reader like myself (or even a conditioned horror-reader like K.) they are disturbing and SO FLIPPING SCARY. Every book deals with a new demon, quite literally: the serial killers aren't humans, but some sort of evil creature. The first demon steals body parts in order to live, the second demon steals emotions in order to feel, and the third demon steals identities in order to be. While on some level, this fantastical element makes things slightly less terrifying [3] - you can sort of comfort yourself with, "Oh, it's a demon doing all these awful things, not a person. Demons aren't real, this level of terribleness doesn't exist, not really" [4] - the fact remains that there is a body-, mind-, or soul-stealing demon brutalizing and terrorizing the town, all of which is nicely recounted for you in gory, technicolor detail by Wells. 

The gore, though, is an integral part of the story; it's rather difficult to get around talking about mutilated dead bodies and violent scenes of destruction and mayhem when your text is narrated, first person, by a teenage sociopath obsessed with serial killers [5]. I don't fault Wells for the gore, and agree that to a certain extent, it was part of the point: terrible things happen to people. People do terrible things. (Why exactly Wells chose to represent the doers-of-terrible-things with demons, I don't know.) This adolescent sociopath-teetering-on-the-edge-of-psychopath is plagued by violent fantasies and dreams - if everything just faded to black at the moment of the demon's killing or Wells skimped on describing the mangled victims, it wouldn't get us into John's head. John's mind is a precise, meticulous, violent place; he would not - and does not - shy away, and therefore the reader cannot be spared the eyeballs-n-entrails [6]. 

There is more than gory [7] squick here, however. Odd as it may seem, based on what I just laid out, these books, deep down, are about empathy and love. Granted, they come at those things sort of sideways and upside down: we learn about love through John's eyes, a boy who has a difficult time understanding or feeling/engendering emotions other than fear. The first book and demon deal with John's fixation on physical violence...and long-term relationships: the demon tears limbs off and disembowels people in order to stay alive for the human woman who has been his wife for decades. 

As he is trying to solve the killings in each book, John always asks these questions when profiling: What does the demon do that it doesn't have to do? and, What does the demon lack? In every case, the reason or the lack is love. Demon 1 stays in Clayton county killing people in order to stay with its wife, who it loves. Book 1 deals with John's desire for physical violence, the torturing-animals sort of violence. A sort of casual, curious violence that springs from wanting to know how things work, or how they respond to harm [8]; the violence of a person who doesn't connect emotionally with others, and therefore doesn't feel bad hurting them. People, to John, are not much different than objects, at least for the first part of the series - it is a continuing struggle for him to remember to call the corpses in the mortuary by animate pronouns, instead of "it". 

***

Mr. Monster thoughts forthcoming. I can only think about these books constructively for so long until my brain goes, "Gah, need happy thoughts. No more despair."

xo, 
Devo




[1] I don't watch the TV, but I do watch shows on the internet...so I guess I watch the internet. 

[2] Yes, I am secretly an 80-year-old woman.

[3] Especially in the third book, which after the complete gross- and awfulness of book 2 was practically a sunshiney day at the park.

[4] Which of course is a fallacy: terrible things happen to people, by people; but it's a nice little fairy tale to sell yourself when it's midnight and you need to go to sleep.

[5] One blurb says John "is as chilling as he is endearing." I disagree. Chilling, yes. Interesting, yes. Not evil, yes. But endearing? Nah. 

[6] Crazy Dru: Do you love my insides, the parts you can't see? Spike: Eyeballs to entrails, my sweet.

[7] One may have read too much Gashleycrumb tinies when one's first impulse is to spell it "gorey". 

[8] the Six-Fingered Man:  "I'm sure you've discovered my deep and abiding interest in pain. Presently I'm writing the definitive work on the subject, so I want you to be totally honest with me on how the machine makes you feel....What did this do to you? Tell me. And remember, this is for posterity so be honest. How do you feel?  [Wesley cries in pain] Interesting."