Blog

Oh, to Live a Dream

What’s something you would attempt if you were guaranteed not to fail. Having “stopped” the serial on serial killers (just kidding apparently, I have at least one more next week on a short story), I was trying to figure out what to do with my blog. For so many years I’ve tried to “keep it professional”… only about writing and reading. Which is what you do when you’re a professional writer, right? Everything comes back to the writing. But today I stumbled on the Jetpack daily prompt, and I had a flashback to my days journaling when I was a teen. I was an obsessive journaler when I was a…

Those Beautiful Days Are a Thing Of the Past

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 that rips your heart out, stomps on it a few times, and doesn’t quite put it back together. But instead leaves you with simmering sadness and a better understanding of the world around you. Spoilers!!! This book released a little over a month ago, so huge warning that there are spoilers in this post. If…

Eat Your Heart Out — Cannibalism and the Serial Killer

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 a prison she has no hope of leaving. According to interviews with the author, it was written with two books in mind: Eat, Pray, Love and American Psycho. Honestly, it falls perfectly in the middle of those two — balancing the “remaking” of a life through travel, food, and intimate relationships while exposing capitalism and…

Cozy Serial Killer Fiction: Please Don’t Tell

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 was the more classic, mainstream books that tend to take the detective or journalist POV. I was also sticking to genres I’m comfortable with: horror, literary, and the occasional romance if it’s dark and/or sarcastically witty. I could maybe be convinced to read a thriller, but wasn’t super interested in crime, procedural or even mystery.…

A Dose of Aural Humanity

There seems to be clearly defined battle lines when you compare audio stories with written narratives. In one camp there’s the “listening isn’t reading!” group. To be fair, there are some benefits to reading as opposed to listening. For me personally, reading allows me greater space to exercise my imagination by putting my own emphasis and tone onto written words. There’s also the idea that reading can increase comprehension, but I think that has more to do with the idea that we often multi-task when listening. Yeah, if I was doing the dishes while reading, I’d also miss a few things. But, the trade-off for me is that I can…

My Favorite Serial Killer, The Sister

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 loved Adepero Oduye’s take on it. She really nails the sarcasm and brings it to life. The book is set in Lagos and told from the POV of Korede, a fairly plain, very organized, clean, and meticulous nurse. Her younger sister is a beautiful fashion designer who everyone loves and happens to be a serial…