For a research library, my university’s stacks are pretty lacking in texts that are actually helpful to most students’ work, so I often help out my students by taking out books from my own library system. This is how I ended up with The Killer Book of Serial Killers. I would never have selected this myself based on the cover alone, but my student found it and was intrigued, and who am I to judge the sources he wants to use for his Criminology final? We discussed a few of the features in it while he was sitting in the office, and I decided maybe I should give it a chance.
Oh, what a mistake that was…..
While the actual information is apparently solid (said student corroborated most of the evidence with other sources), the structure is so campy, it’s hard to take seriously. Each serial killer is given their own chapter, predicated by a graphic of a body chalk-outline and crime scene tape. The chapter has a ‘notable quote’ from the killer at the top of the chapter that may or may not be explained in the biography, and creepy fonts are deployed in the chapter titles and paragraph breaks. While I have no issue with creativity in a book’s structure, all of these things set the tone of the book to be downright cartoonish. This may have been what the authors were going for– a little lightheartedness about a dark and terrible subject–but it just made me question how seriously I should take the book.
The writing itself is highly sensationalized, reading more like a tabloid write-up than an informative narrative. The authors also embedded their own judgement on the killers instead of laying out the facts and letting the reader make their own decisions. While I wouldn’t normally have an issue with someone sitting in judgement of a man who kept the corpses of his lovers under the floor, I felt that the authors were leading me to agree with their personal judgement of these killers, rather than letting me come to the conclusion on my own.
I did learn, I’ll give the book that. I did find it interesting that the height of American serial killer spanned from around the 1960s – 1980s, and then just seem to go away. The book doesn’t really explain any reasons for why since its sole focus is biographical, but these stories have made me interested in following the thread of what caused this 30 year span of (mostly) men hell-bent on killing such specific targets.
1 star because I did take something away.