Koji A. Dae
As I said in a recent blog post, I plan to spend the next few months reading books about serial killers to get an idea of the current approach to serial killers. My focus will mostly be on indie books and serial killer books that have some supernatural aspects. However, I’ll also be expanding into other areas. You can follow along with what I’m reading here:
| Title | Author | Gender of Author | Gender of Killer | Status | Year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Killer Inside Me | Jim Thompson | man | man | read | 1952 |
| A Good Man Is Hard To Find | Flannery O’Connor | woman | man | read | 1953 |
| The Wasp Factory | Iain Banks | man | It’s complicated? | read | 1984 |
| Perfume | Patrick Suskind | 1985 | |||
| Zombie | Joyce Carol Oates | woman | man | 1995 | |
| the sluts | dennis cooper | 2004 | |||
| Sharp Objects | Gillian Flynn | woman | woman (child) | read | 2006 |
| Heartsick | Chelsea Cain | woman | woman | 2007 | |
| Child 44 | Tom Rob Smith | man | man | read | 2008 |
| My Pet Serial Killer | Michael J. Seidlinger | 2013 | |||
| Bones and All | Camille DeAngelis | woman | various | read | 2015 |
| There’s Someone Inside Your House | Stephanie Perkins | woman | man (teen) | read | 2017 |
| My Sister the Serial Killer | Oyinkan Braithwaite | woman | woman | read | 2018 |
| A Certain Hunger | Chelsea G. Summers | woman | woman | read | 2019 |
| They Never Learn | Layne Fargo | 2020 | |||
| The Serial Killer’s Wife | Alice Hunter | woman | man | read | 2021 |
| My Men | Victoria Kielland | 2021 | |||
| So Beautiful and Elastic | Gary J. Shipley | 2023 | |||
| Butcher and Blackbird | Brynne Weaver | woman | various (mostly men) | read | 2023 |
| Kill for Love | Laura Picklesimer | 2023 | |||
| Maeve Fly | CJ Leede | 2023 | |||
| Crushing Snails | Emma E. Murray | woman | woman (teen) | read | 2024 |
| Love Letters to a Serial Killer | Tasha Coryell | woman | woman | read | 2024 |
| I Was a Teenage Slasher | Stephen Graham Jones | 2024 | |||
| Vanishing Daughters | Cynthia Pelayo | 2025 | |||
| Shoot Me In The Face On A Beautiful Day | Emma Murray | woman | man | read | 2025 |
Flynn is one of the modern masters of revealing the horrors of the home. Her take on serial killers is one of the best.
Continue Reading Sharp Objects: A Child Caught In the Horror of Femininity
Finally got a serial killer short story in my series… and it was well worth the wait. Make sure to check out the link to the Drabblecast version.
I’ve come full circle in this exploration of serial killers in fiction. What kicked everything off was Crushing Snails by Emma Murray, and about a year later, I’ve arrived at Murray’s next book: Shoot Me in the Face on a Beautiful Day. Once again Murray features a serial killer along with a brutal female perspective…
Continue Reading Those Beautiful Days Are a Thing Of the Past
The most recent serial killer book I read was A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers. The book is absolutely brilliant. 10/10, lovely writing, witty, thoughtful, sarcastic voice and just dark enough to keep my internal “horror” reader engaged. It features a middle-aged female serial killer, Dorothy, writing her tell-all memoir from the confines of…
Continue Reading Eat Your Heart Out — Cannibalism and the Serial Killer
I started this journey with very specific types of serial killer fiction in mind. I wanted to read POV serial killer fiction with a focus on the difference through time and regarding gender. But as I read, that scope has widened and shifted. Throughout it all, the one type of book I wasn’t interested in…
Continue Reading Cozy Serial Killer Fiction: Please Don’t Tell
One of my favorite books of all time and definitely one of my favorite serial killer books is My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite. I originally read this back when it first came out in 2018, and it’s stuck with me since. But I did a re-listen to it this week, and I…
Buckle in. This post is going to contain major spoilers for Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory. And it’s one of those books that has twists that range from fairly big to huge, and the BEST way to go into the book is without knowing much about it — definitely not knowing the spoilers. Before I…
I wanted to love Butcher and Blackbird by Brynne Weaver so much. It promised three things I love: serial killers, spicy romance, and alt culture/kink. I started reading it, and I was gripped. The first half of the book was really great. But as soon as the two main characters confess their love and started…
Continue Reading Killer Romance: Deconstructing the Serial Killer Archetype in Butcher and Blackbird
I commented on social media the other day that I’m looking for writers to discuss serial killer writing with. Unfortunately, x-twitter doesn’t lead to the depth of conversation that a hotel bar might, but I got a few responses. One of the discussions brought up an entire framework of serial killer fiction that I hadn’t…
Continue Reading Dissecting Obsession: Why Do We Read About Serial Killers?
When I picked up Love Letters to a Serial Killer by Tasha Coryell, I’ll admit I was looking for something lighter than what I’ve been reading. One can only go so dark before they need to pull back and laugh a little. While I wouldn’t call the book a comedy, I will say that it…
Continue Reading Twisted Romance: Falling for a Serial Killer
This was an unexpected jog off the path for me. I usually class cannibal stories as separate from serial killer stories. In my mind, they are closer to zombie stories than serial killer stories. I guess the flesh eating aspect of it (which, I find super gross) puts them into the same “ew” box in…
There’s something so familiar about the teenage slasher genre that it’s almost comforting. In that way, There’s Someone Inside Your House by Stephanie Perkins was a — (dare I say it?) — cozy read. The book was published in 2017, and was Perkin’s first foray into horror, her first three books being contemporary romance. The…
This week’s book was The Serial Killer’s Wife by Alice Hunter. It was published in 2021, and apparently Hunter has a few thematically related books, The Serial Killer’s Daughter and The Serial Killer’s Sister. She worked as an interventions facilitator in a prison, often working with prisoners who’d committed violent crimes. So one would assume…
One of the earliest published books on my serial killer to-read list was The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Thompson is a pulp writer of the 1950s, with over 30 books published, and The Killer Inside Me is one of the first serial killer books from the point of view of the serial killer.…
Musings on Crushing Snails by Emma E. Murray and the first blog in my series on serial killers in contemporary literature.
Continue Reading Crushing Snails: A Story That Absolutely Crushed Me
I’ve been thinking of what I want to do with my blog. As social media has fallen off for me (Twitter makes me angry. Blue Sky is nice at times, but I find I still spend too much time scrolling. I can’t for the life of me figure out how Instagram is supposed to work…