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 my mind. So I decided to watch the Bones and All movie starring  Taylor Russell and Timothée Chalamet completely separate from this series. It was only after watching the movie that I realized that, yes, it is a serial killer story. Perhaps even more-so than a slasher.

I enjoyed the movie so much that I decided to read the book it was based on immediately after it. I was a bit hesitant because Camille DeAngelis, the author, acknowledges that the story is about veganism. While I thoroughly support people choosing veganism, and I sometimes struggle over the ethics of eating animals, I wasn’t sure I wanted to dive into a thinly veiled criticism of the omnivore diet. But in the first few pages, it is clear this story is a lot more than a single thinly veiled metaphor. The book speaks to uncontrollable urges, to coming to terms with the bad things we may have done, and to developing ethics in a world that is not one-size-fits-all.

The Cannibal, the Ghoul, and the Neo-gothic Serial Killer

Throughout the book, main-character Maren is interested in both cannibals and demons/monsters, trying to figure out exactly what she is. Sully (her grandfather cannibal) talks about how cannibalism in tribal culture involves a passing of generational wisdom. She later is able to name the dewey codes for cannibals and demons and, in the end, seems to embrace her role as a succubus. This “am I human or a monster” is a recurring theme in serial killer fiction. Are serial killers humans, or are they something outside of humanity? Are their actions based on choice or are they unable to control themselves?

The movie Bones and All was marketed as a cannibal love story, but the book, though starting from the concept of cannibals in love, moved to the realm of ghouls as opposed to cannibals. DeAngelis made the distinction that ghouls were supernatural — they could consume all of a person (bones and all) in a single sitting. Which explains how toddler Maren eats her the entirety of her babysitter, leaving only the bones and then teen and adult ghouls are able to eat everything — bones and all. This ghoulish aspect explains not only the ability to consume a body, but the desire to do so. In the movie, entire bodies are never consumed. Instead, it’s a very human, cannibalistic devouring that always leaves behind a mess — which is probably easier and more visually interesting to film than a magic scene in which all of the body is devoured. Miyako Pleines has a great article in Lithub outlining these differences, focusing on the aspect of choice — that a ghoul does not have the choice to devour humans while a cannibal does. But even in the movie, where they were cannibals instead of ghouls, I did not see that choice. They were driven by an unquenchable need to eat. It was far from the cultural aspect of cannibalism that can be taught and accepted or rejected.

There are other aspects that take the ghoul further away from the humanity of a serial killer — mostly their supernatural powers. A ghoul more or less doesn’t have to deal with the aftermath of a kill. Yes, there’s some cleanup and disposal, but nothing that compares to what a human would have to do. I think the way a human serial killer deals with the cold fact of that disposal, and that they’re still able to kill again, is a key component to the serial killer that the characters in the book don’t have to face.

Reading about the history of serial killer fiction and the way it came from the gothic concept of the monster, makes it impossible to unsee the vampire or werewolf as a precursor to the fictional serial killer. I think in DeAngelis’ writing, the ghoul becomes even closer to human than I’ve ever seen a vampire. The characters do not refer to themselves as something outside of humanity. They think of themselves as humans with a certain hunger — much the way human serial killers describe their desire to murder, especially when related to ritual murder. They are more aware of social expectations and how society is built than the everyday human, and inso, they are also more concerned with where and how they fit into humanity. Though there is some distance of “not belonging”, the freedom of “the other” given to vampires and zombies is not afforded to DeAngelis’ characters. They hold guilt and a longing to be loved in a way an inhuman character never could.

The Taboo of Consumption

Bones and All is filled with references to consumption. Of course the main consumption is that of people. These cannibals do not simply eat flesh. They devour the complete entity of a person. There are allusions to the consumption of another as a way to gain wisdom, but Maren disregards their consumption as something with an end goal or benefit. It is simply consumption. It is filling a basic physical need, not something to be draped in ritual and made romantic or beneficial. In fact, she hates that she is driven to consume.

The theme of consumption doesn’t end there, though. Throughout the book Maren is keenly aware of food — mostly because she is approaching it from a position of scarcity. She never knows when or what her next meal will be. So every meal becomes heightened, whether its a stolen, out-of-date sandwich or the luxury of a homecooked meal. She becomes thankful for each act of consumption in a way she wasn’t when she was living with her mother and had regular access to food.

It is also notable where each type of food comes from. For example, Sully, who represents a familial bond (ironically only until she learns they are actually related), gives warm, nourishing homecooked meals. They are hearty meals, and some of the ones that Maren favors most — despite knowing that he has previously cooked his relatives organs into similar meals. His go-to, the “hobo stew” becomes a way for Maren to embrace her hobo lifestyle and, through consumption, take comfort in her new position. Alternatively, when Maren and Lee break into a show-home, they “play” at a life that could be if they were born differently. But the play is hollow, as shown that the only thing to eat in the home is cookies — sweet, not nutritious, and there for creating a scent rather than to be consumed.

It is also telling that when they clean the house upon leaving, Maren wonders if the real estate agent will know they were there from the missing tube of cookies. In other words — in the “common ethics” the missing of something is cause for concern. But this is juxtaposed against the people that simply vanish and no one seems to miss/investigate simply because their vanishing is impossible.

So Bad You Won’t Believe It

Most serial killer books do not start out with a toddler killer. The toddler might be aggressive, but usually even that comes in late childhood or early adolescence. I suppose in Bones and All this was meant to show the innate, unstoppable drive in Maren — that this is what she is. But it also highlights something we see glossed over in other serial killer books: the fact that their crimes are so atrocious that they can get away with them simply because no one will believe they can happen.

With human serial killers, the murder of animals and then humans should be believable. It’s within our physical capabilities. But it is so far beyond our moral understanding of the world, that we would rather believe in anything but this violation of the common order. That refusal of possibility creates a shroud that hides the actions of the serial killer until they’ve killed many people and their acts become undeniable.

When Maren killed as a child, her mother moved her, saying that there would come a day when people would believe the things she had done, basically that when she becomes an adult, people will be able to believe she could kill and eat someone. She lives in fear of that moment when she will be held accountable for her actions. But when she steps into the adult world and meets other eaters, what she learns is they are able to move freely through the world and consume others simply because no one believes that what they do is possible. This is most telling when the orderly tells Maren that he sought out other eaters, and that some people on the police force know about them. But they do nothing simply because this kind of crime is beyond not only our laws, but our comprehension.

In the end, Maren has three choices — to die, to put herself in an asylum, or to embrace her desires. There is no choice that leads to redemption. No way to pay for her crimes because no one would believe them. And so all that is left for her to do is keep committing the same crime over and over.

Devouring and the Need for Love

In Bones and All, each eater has a different type of hunger. In the movie, these cravings can be overcome and the eaters can share victims, eating any human. But the book projects a more structured type of eating. Sully only eats dead people, with a strong preference for his family. Lee only eats “bad” people — those he thinks deserve it. This need for a “type” of victim is showcased when Travis tells Maren he can be whatever she needs him to be in order to be eaten.

But Maren’s relationship to eating is complex. The cover copy says,”Anytime someone cares for her too much, she can’t seem to stop herself from eating them.” So, it is a hunger for love and acceptance. But there are several people who argue that Maren has a similar self-preservation as Lee, eating people who would harm her or are pushing her sexual boundaries. Her first two boy victims can’t be said to have loved her — they wanted her for kissing and for “show my yours, I’ll show you mine.” Into her teen years, it was anytime she was faced with physical intimacy, not emotional intimacy, that she ate. In that way, the story can be said to be more about the unease of sexual discovery as opposed to a craving for intimacy and belonging.

However, the way Maren is ostracized from society flips the narrative back into the “serial killer killing because they don’t fit in” trope. A serial killer decides they will never be accepted for who they are, and so they kill anyone who catches a glimpse of their true self. In the movie version, this is driven home by Sully, who wants to kill Maren not because she is his granddaughter, but because she knows too much about him, not in a way that could get him in trouble, but in an intimate way.

Maren spends most of the book trying to understand why she does what she does, and feeling a whole lot of guilt about it. But when she eats Lee, she feels an absolution for her actions. Because he knows who she is and what she does — not only that she is an eater, but that her trigger is intimacy — she feels absolved when he still loves her enough to seek out the intimacy that he knows will destroy him. This creates a point when Maren could, if she were human, find healing and stop her killing. But she is a monster (and serial killers are painted with the same almost supernatural inability to stop), and so instead she shifts her killing, trying to recreate that moment of full consent and understanding in her next victim. Only this fails, because as stated earlier, no one will believe what she is. It’s my theory that she will keep seeking out that validation she felt with Lee throughout her life as she slowly descends deeper into madness, perhaps warping the world more and more to fit into her new ethical schema.

Everyone is Evil

In Bones and All, Maren is surrounded by awful people, which I believe is a cornerstone to the serial killer story. Whereas the slasher plays on tropes of innocence, the serial killer story revels in the morally grey character. Perhaps Maren’s first victim’s only fault was in loving her too much. But after that, even among eight year old boys, we begin to get characters who always seem to want something from Maren — whether that’s her body, or her need, they want to own or dominate her. We have Maren’s mother, who we hate for abandoning her and, at the same time we can understand. She felt responsible for enabling each murder, and she was exhausted.

Perhaps the most morally grey characters we have are the eaters themselves, though. Lee seems to only kill “bad” people — which in a way echoes the serial killers who see themselves as an extension of a higher power, doling out justice on humanity. We have Sully who (at first) only eats the already dead. Then we have Maren, who seems to be searching for an ethical framework for her own need to kill. This ethical framework — outside of the understood human morality — is a key theme in serial killer books. Every killer has, at some point either consciously rejected the ethical framework of modern society or has had a mental break that no longer allows them to see it as reasonable, and it becomes a way for the reader to begin to examine the ethics they have internalized.

Killing is bad, yes. But so is abandoning people. So is breaching people’s boundaries. So is using and abusing people. So is pedophilia. So is and so on…. by examining our everyday actions through the upside-down ethics of a serial killer, we’re able to chip away at how we’ve adopted these ethics, why each is important, and how we uphold them. In a lot of ways, we are able to use these violations of the ethical norm to build stronger, more coherent and defendable ethical frameworks.

Unease in the Modern Family

Perhaps the most serial killer aspect of this book is the unease within the modern family. In serial killer psychology and most of the books written about them, the root cause of their actions stems from childhood trauma. Not just a single act of trauma, but continued trauma, usually inflicted (intentionally or not) by a close family member. The serial killer ends up recreating scenarios to “heal” their earlier trauma by killing facsimiles of their mother or father or grandparent. Until the late 1990s, this “family trauma” focused on a single rotten family member. Occasionally there was an entirely bad family, but the problems of the family were insular to the killer.

In books written after the start of the 2000s, I’m seeing more broken families. Not just divorced parents (although that’s common), but absent parents. Alcoholic parents. Abuse extending through generations. This is no longer an origin story in a single rotten family member, but a broader critique of the modern family. There seems to be a deep sense of resentment and distrust when it comes to the family. What was once supposed to be a scene of stability and safety is now felt as a place of pain and insecurity.

This is shown in Bones and All starting from the very beginning when Maren’s mother abandons her. Maren has always felt her mother distancing herself. She provided for and protected Maren, but she could never love her killer daughter for what she was. Whether this is true or a projection of Maren’s guilt is unclear, but it eventually leads to the early abandonment that starts the book. After, the entire book is spent looking for family. First, to find her mother again, then to find her father. But anywhere Maren turns, her family is worse. From a mother who abandoned her, to a father who also abandoned her (in theory for her own good) to a grandfather who wants nothing more than to eat her. Anywhere she seeks family, she is faced with the harsh reality that blood means worse than nothing. Similarly, Lee’s family was an absentee mother and a series of her abusive boyfriends that he was forced to kill to protect him and his sister throughout their childhood.

What about found family? Adopted family? Well, Maren’s father was adopted and supposedly his parents never found out he was an eater. But they also never loved him for himself. The adopted home was not one of safety, but grief, where he served as a replacement child that could never live up to the person he was meant to replace.

The closest thing to found family in the book is the relationship between Lee and Maren, and as a person born of the generation that trusts the concept of found family more than blood family, I was rooting for them to create their own family. But, when their relationship moved to love of attraction — the kind that can start a family — it could only end in disaster. Because neither of them knows how to belong to a family. Lee only knows how to give of himself to protect his family, and Maren only knows how to take from others to protect herself.

These themes of not only broken families, but a complete distrust of the American family were also seen in There’s Somebody Inside Your House. I’m very interested to see if this theme occurs in adult serial killer books and how its handled by other authors.

I may have rambled a bit in this post, and I definitely swerved away from serial killers to just look at some of the themes in Bones and All. But I’ll forgive myself because it was such an intriguing and beautifully written book. I’m in love with it. I’ll also forgive myself because apparently if I don’t, I’ll end up eating everyone I love.

As a reminder, my serial killer novella is out from Ghost Orchid Press on May 27. Early reviews are coming in and readers have a lot of positive things to say about it!