I have always been fascinated by serial killers. The idea that there are genuine monsters walking among us wearing human faces has always held more interest to me than tales of ghosts, vampires, zombies, and demons. Supernatural stories tend to really tax my suspension of disbelief unless written really, really well. Serial killers require no suspension of disbelief, because they actually exist.
When I was a little kid I found a book about Jack The Ripper in my elementary school library with actual crime scene photos and uncensored descriptions.
These were very different times, clearly. Many of the books I picked up in the school library would get a school librarian cruxified for today. But, things were a lot looser then. I remember being in awe of what I was reading. If memory serves me, I believe it was my older sister who initially read the book, and told me about it. I thought she was full of shit at first, but then I found it sitting on a shelf in the school library at Lingelbach Elementary.
I read that book from cover to cover in a day or two and I couldn't believe it. It simply could not be real. There was no way human beings did things like that to each other. I had the same reaction when she brought home books about the holocaust. When I read them myself, I struggled to make sense of it all. My mind went through the mental gymnastics of an eight or nine year-old with an active imagination. My big question was “How?” “Why?”
I became obsessed with books about serial killer. There were two other Jack The Ripper books in the school library and I don’t know how many more I found in the two local public libraries, but I literally read them all between ages eight and ten. I had to understand how such things as human predators were possible. That same year I found out about homosexuality, and my wheels began to turn.
This was 1979, and I recall asking my mom, with all the innocence of a nine-year-old, how you knew if you were gay or how you became gay? My mother was 29 years old at the time, and was just learning about human sexuality herself. She had books around the house like, The Joy of Sex, The Sensuous Woman, Human Sexual Response by Masters and Johnson, and a host of others. My mother was drawing upon the woefully limited pool of knowledge on human sexuality available to her at the time to form her reply. I remember her answer being something about your sexuality developing when you hit puberty, and then you would know. Taking this information and marrying it with my own prepubescent knowledge and intellect, I deduced that the same thing must be true of rapists and serial killers. It was something you would discover about yourself when you hit puberty. In my mind, anyone could become a serial killer. It was merely an accident of birth like whether you got your mother's eyes or your father's. I lived in dire fear of puberty from then on.
When I watched Halloween, Psycho, Zodiac Killer, Last House On The Left, Maniac, and My Bloody Valentine (we didn't give a damn about ratings back then) I wasn't afraid of being attacked by a murderous psychopath. I was afraid of becoming one. Did I also mention I had three of the four early warning signs of serial killers? I was a bedwetter. I started fires. I had a very strong, domineering (though also sweet and loving) mother. The only thing I didn't do was torture animals. I loved animals. But, I was pretty sure I was fucked. I felt like it was inevitable that one day I would wake up with the uncontrollable urge to store human heads in my freezer.
Well, I didn't turn into a slavering murderous psychopath. If you have ever met me and know how sensitive and kind-hearted I am, you probably laughed at the idea that I ever thought I might become a psychopathic killer. Or, perhaps I protest too much.
Puberty came and went with little change to my behavior other than the all-consuming urge to stick my dick in almost any hole that presented itself. An urge that lasted into my forties if I'm being honest. I didn’t become a serial killer. I promise. There are no heads in my freezer. I did remain curious about them, and that's why I write about them so often now.
When I wrote Succulent Prey, I was drawing upon my childhood fear of becoming a psychopathic murderer. The idea that something that horrible could become a compulsion that was out of my control to resist terrified me, so I thought maybe it would terrify the reader as well. Population Zero explored it a bit as well, with the main character being sort of an accidental serial killer who started out with the best of intentions. His Pain was sort of the same thing. A boy who went through so much pain, and after learning how to turn pain into pleasure, wanted to share his discovery with the world. Even Pure Hate touched on it a bit, with Malcolm being a guy so consumed by hate that it transformed him into a monster.
I write so often from the killer’s perspective because it's their minds that continue to fascinate me. That's also why I don't usually find characters that are just purely evil very compelling. Evil is not an answer. It's not an explanation. It’s a cop-out.
“Why did he kill that man?”
“Because he's eeeeeevil!”
“But what does he want?”
“To do eeevil!”
“Okay, but what's his motivation? What drives him?”
“Being eeeeevil!”
“Nevermind.”
That's why I can't get into most stories about devils and demons unless they take the time to explain the demon's motivations. That's what I find interesting, even more than the horrors they commit. At least with monsters, creatures, or even zombies and vampires, you have pretty straightforward motivations like hunger, territory, fear, or even rage and revenge. Those all make sense. “Evil” as a character’s motivation, in my not-so-humble opinion, is just lazy and stupid.
I am currently writing a novel about subhuman creatures hunting humans for food and in competition for territory. I used both motivations because when the motivation is food alone, eventually you would think the motherfuckers would be full. And that's why I love a good slasher. Serial killers have appetites that can never be satiated. They just keep killing and killing story after story, novel after novel, film after film. They are my favorite monsters.
"I didn’t become a serial killer. I promise," is totally something a serial killer would say.
That was a great post! I feel exactly the same way about serial killers. You got started on evil by reading about Jack the Ripper. For me, it was a book about terrorism. The book talked a lot about torture, and I couldn't believe people could do such things to each other. The book described putting insects inside a woman's private area and I was in total shock. I will always remember that book. Then I read The Stranger Besides Me and Manhunter, and those changed everything. I was hooked on serial killlers, and could never read nor write too much about them, they are fascinating, the human as predator