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 considered before. Richard Kadrey mentioned that the modern serial killer author needs to look beyond the flashiness of the crimes and find something more interesting to tell. For example, why were they able to get away with their crimes for so long?
This made me realize that while I tend to look at the “what in society makes a serial killer”, there’s also the completely valid angle of “what in society allows a serial killer to continue killing?” Which got me thinking about serial killer frameworks. I’m not talking exactly about genre here — though expanding the social imagination of the serial killer into unexpected genres does allow us to stretch the various frameworks. I’m more talking about why we read serial killer books and, by extension, why we write them.
When I started this series, one of my friends discouraged me from this particular rabbit hole. He said serial killers are boring — everyone wants to think there’s some reason why they do what they do, but there’s no reason. To which, I get his weariness on the topic. But I also think there are two things he’s missing:
- Every generation has to go through the “understanding serial killers” phase on their own. Just because you’ve already gone through it does not mean that someone else should listen to your conclusions without their own journey. This is why fiction, in itself, is full of atavisms. We rehash the same topics over and over, each generation discovering and exploring. We build on the lessons learned by past generations, but we also infuse out stories with the anxieties and hopes of the current generation. When we write about serial killers in 2025, we are taking the common language created by the neo-gothic exploration of the 1950s-1990s and twisting it to show how we’ve changed since then.
- Exploring the fiction of serial killers (as opposed to the actual crimes of real people) allows us insight into the shared subconscious of a moment. Serial killer fiction is one of the best styles for looking for social and psychological critique. It has the potential to hold some of the strongest political themes without being overhanded or preachy about them.
Perhaps my reasons for continuing this series are less important than sharing the things I’m discovering about the stories, though. After my jog back to The Killer In Me I’ve been reading a few more recent books. Love Letters to a Serial Killer and Butcher and Blackbird, both take a romance angle and rely on wit and black comedy rather than traditional fear and tension associated with the straight horror or thriller genres serial killer books usually fall into. This has been a refreshing reprieve from the psycho-profile style books I started with, and along with Kadrey’s comments, have me thinking more deeply about what we can do with the trope of the serial killer by stringing him up in a variety of frameworks. What worked in the 1900s — presenting horrible acts for shock value — no longer works when most of society has not only read books that contain these acts, but seen movies and, hell, actual news stories that portray the horrors of humanity.
So what are writers doing in this century? How can we still be writing about serial killers when “it’s all been done before?” Below I propose a few frameworks that serial killer fiction follows. Each one takes either a psychological or sociological perspective and allows us to view a snapshot of society through the lens of the author.
The Psychological Frameworks
There are two psychological frameworks (Perhaps three, but the third seems underdeveloped in literature). Each of these looks at the how and why of an individual. However, for any of these to be done well, they are usually paired with a sociological framework — the how and why of a society. The how and why of the individual satisfies the innate curiosity and longing to understand that which we fear. But the how and why of the society allows us to relate to a story that would otherwise be completely foreign to us. In other words, the psychological framework pulls us in but it’s the sociological framework that keeps us invested.
The Psycho-profile: Understanding the Serial Killer
The psycho-profile takes its name from Simpson’s Psycho Path’s framework. It is perhaps the most initially fascinating to new readers in the genre and looks at why and how a killer kills. These books tend to be first person killer POV and make the reader an accomplice to horrible acts through the reading of the story. You find yourself following the logic of the killer, at times thinking: Well, of course they had to kill that person, otherwise… as if killing people is a normal option to life’s problems. These stories dive deep into the psyche of the killer and, when done well, can make you feel a little sleazy when you come up for air. In my opinion, the strongest of these feature logic, leading the reader down a breadcrumb path of understanding and acceptance of atrocious acts.
These stories answer the basic fascination of why and how? What is so broken in some people that they are able to not only kill a person, but often ritually mutilate them? They fulfill a very basic need to understand that which we fear.
So what’s different about these stories in 2025 than 1950? Honestly, not a lot. Reading Crushing Snails was, in a lot of ways, similar to reading The Killer Inside Me. But if I had to name something, it would be the world the killer lives in that creates and supports their logic. For example, killers in the 1950s might be more supported by textbooks and newspapers while modern serial killers find their reasoning echoed back to them online. As a writer, and an individual, it’s so easy to strip technology from a serial killer’s life. They must be backwards. Unconnected. Lonely and isolated. But I think the psycho-profile is going to lean more into the killer’s relationship with technology in the coming years. From as small as getting a cell phone call while they’re carrying out a murder, to researching techniques or luring victims online. The pervasiveness of the internet is something that is slowly making its way to the psycho-profile.
The Obsession Story: Understanding Our Fascination with Serial Killers
The second psychological framework is understanding our fascination with serial killers. This goes peripheral to the killer themself and extends to the people obsessed with true crime or those who end up falling in love with killers. In many ways this becomes a meta genre, because we’re looking at the ways in which the fascination of previous generations has created celebrity from killing. Serial killers created the serial killer genre, but the serial killer genre created the serial killer fan. These stories look at the whys and hows of that fanaticism.
As an example, Gillian Flynn’s Dark Places (yes, I know not so much a serial killer as murder spree — though I would argue there are hints that the murderer may be a serial murderer) looks at how true crime fanatics can affect the family of victims, creating both an avenue for retraumatizing the peripheral victims while offering the financial and technological path towards exploration and closure. We look into the personal harm this obsession can create as well as the eventual release it may help serve.
Perhaps a closer example is Love Letters to a Serial Killer where we get deep into the psyche of someone who falls in love with a serial killer. We see how obsession with justice can morph into a feeling of importance in a world where we feel invisible and impotent. Then we can see how the need to keep that feeling of importance can lead to a confused obsession with the killer that can be mistaken for love. While I think this book is more of a critique on the society that creates loneliness and isolation while promoting the concept that we’re all main characters than a true psychological profile, it does linger on how the wounds are taken to their extreme through internal twisting of events and logic.
Speaker for the Dead: Giving Space to the Victims
Throughout history, the serial killer has always overshadowed their victims. Some would say its a simple matter of mathematics: one killer stands out whereas the story of their twenty victims blends together. While there has been a social push to center the victim in actual crime, that makes a difficult translation to literature. In Love Letters to a Serial Killer, Hannah regularly cites her centering of the victims as the reason for her true crime obsession. She wants to find the killer for the sake of the victims. She is determined to make sure each of them is remembered. But the book shows how each victim is less important than the last. Eventually giving only a few paragraphs to the final victim, and that in relation to Hannah’s own perceived importance (ie danger).
I think it’s extremely difficult to center the victims in a serial killer story. Mostly because the victims aren’t working towards their deaths. It is most often a senseless act of chance that puts them in the sights of the killer. Or it is the killer’s obsession. In other words, even though we want to give the victims space, it is not them driving the story. So we center the killer.
Not a book, but I think Woman of the Hour did an excellent job centering the victims. Visually, the killer remains offscreen most of the movie. When he kills, only parts of him are shown — reducing him to an act of violence while centering the loss of the victims. I think it proves that it is possible to center the victims in a serial killer story, and with the social lean towards that, I will be interested to see which books can pull it off in the next few years.
Sociological Frameworks
Sociological frameworks look at all of the ways we as a society are failing, and how those failures create and enable serial killers. For me, this is where serial killer fiction gets really interesting and can be used as a political tool. However, it does seem like the more stories are written, the more heavy-handed and preachy we can get in these books. I think there needs to be a fine line between the sociological anxiety and psychological curiosity in order to pull off a really engaging serial killer book.
The Origin Story: Understanding How Society Creates a Serial Killer
The origin story looks at how the serial killer was created. This is where we really get into the subconscious anxieties of society. We have come to accept that a person needs a certain disposition to become a serial killer, but they also need the “right” (or more accurately, very wrong) situation to nurture the instinct to kill.
The “easy” solution is the abusive home. But books that do this well extend out from the act of abuse to look at how that abuse conflicts with or supports society. It follows that the easiest critique in the origin story is that of the family. A place of safety that is instead one of horror. The most common critiques being the isolation of the nuclear family in modern society, including the uninterrupted, absolute control of the parents. However, we also get more nuanced critiques such as main character syndrome, consumerism and a feeling of disposability, perfectionism and imposter syndrome etc.
Origin stories tend to be more powerful when it’s not just one thing: it’s not just the abusive parent that corrupts and exploits the concept of family, but it’s the school teacher that doesn’t speak up, the cop that returns the child home, the brothers and sisters that exploit the abuse for their own safety. It’s the snuff films available online, the mocking of students in school, romantic rejection in a time when adolescent coupling is considered necessary and not having a significant other is a sign of deviance.
Serial killer novels in the twentieth century usually gave glimpses of the origin in order to help explain the why of the killer. In other words, the sociological commentary was sublimated to the psychological breaking of the killer. In such, it was generally a hint at a dark past, usually revealed through their ritual. In the twenty-first century, we’ve already explored the psychological reasons deeply, and its time for the sociological reasons to shine. This leads to more budding serial killer and origin stories.
The Never Ending Story: Understanding How Society Enables a Serial Killer
The stories that explain how a killer is able to keep killing perhaps create a more concrete, visible critique of society. For example, we get bureaucracy that allows criminals to flourish or cops who return their victims to their killers. Or we get a breakdown of communication often caused by pride and falsely carved out jurisdictions that enable a killer to jump location and kill for years without being noticed as a serial killer. These are the classic causes of enablement that generally critique our systems of law and protection.
However, I’ve also seen continued critique of the broken family as a form of enablement, such as in There’s Someone Inside Your House.
I think this is one of the frameworks I haven’t read a lot of — usually because it falls into the procedural, mystery genre as opposed to the horror genre. However, now that I’ve identified it as a potential framework, I’m definitely going to be on the lookout for it.
The Absurd Killer: Critiquing Society Through Dark Comedy
Finally, we have the critique of society through absurd stories. Butcher and Blackbird, taking serial killers into the realm of romance, I’m looking at you! Looking at serial killers as shy, awkward individuals who need love in their lives is not the normal approach. There is a bit of the feeling of “if only they were loved, they could be saved from the monstrosity that they have become”, which I feel is far from the reality of serial killers. But in that absurdity, we are able to look at both the origin story and the enablement stories through an even more critical lens. We pair up the absurd — a “good” serial killer — with the horrible things they do, and we find ourselves rooting for them, hoping they’ll come out on top or find love.
These stories become a critique of law enforcement (when only a serial killer can protect us from serial killers) but also of the origin story. What if they weren’t fully broken to start with? What if there’s inherent goodness that was broken by society? Like the framework before, this is one I’m still working on articulating. But I find the books in this framework to be highly entertaining.
I’d love to hear about other frameworks you’ve developed for reading/writing serial killer fiction. I’d also love more books that fit within these frameworks, and why. In the meantime, I’ll keep reading and musing and trying to understand our world one book at a time.
