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. Okay, I had to check that “fact”. So I just fell down a rabbit hole of history sites, blogs, critiques and (gulp) thesis papers to confirm that The Killer Inside Me does seem to be the first book written from the POV of a serial killer, though neither the first book from the POV of a killer nor the first book about a serial killer. I’m still open to hearing that I’m wrong about that, though I’m not sure how much further I’ll go back in my reading.

While I was down that big, wide rabbit hole, I came across some interesting ideas about the serial killer genre, and I thought I’d share some of them before getting into the book.
(You can skip directly to the critique of The Killer Inside Me by clicking here)

Gothic Roots, Anxiety Over Social Systems, and the Monster

From what I could find, the modern serial killer in literature has its roots in the Whitechapel Murders and Jack the Ripper. The Whitechapel murders were by far not the first instance of serial murders. But they did coincide with the industrial revolution bringing more anonymity to cities along with the rise of sensational press being fed to the now-literate masses.

The wide publicity of the murders — done partly in the name of public safety and partly due to sensationalism — shaped the public imagination around the murders while promoting paranoia of “the other within”. In other words, the murderer must be an “insider” who looked and acted like others because of his ability to get to and away from murder sites undetected. The sensationalism also promoted a dark curiosity about the murders, an aspect that would allow the publicity to bleed into fiction. People were hungry for this variation of depravity — because they wanted to understand it? Because they wanted to feel safe? Or because they saw an unraveling of their society that they could not name? It’s unclear. But what is clear is there was a desire for it. And it was filled with the penny dreadfuls — speculative stories that gave various theories for the who and how of the murders that were not constrained by fact. In other words, the original True Crime novels.

The White Chapel Murders took place between 1888 and 1891. Half a century before, Mary Shelley published Frankenstein — a monster created by a human from literal parts of humans — and Edgar Allen Poe was working to instill a sense of unease about the neighbors next door and what horrors they might be committing. In that century, the public imagination was thick with the concept of a decaying social sphere along with the question of evil within man. Two years before the murders started, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was published, and many newspapers used it as an example of how a serial murderer could live within society undetected. The parallels between the book and murders were hit on so strongly that some people thought the actor who was currently playing Dr. Jekyll in a stage play might be the White Chapel killer. Many people argue that this basis of “the hidden other”, monsters among men, and the dual nature of good and evil in man showcased in gothic literature shaped the public image of the White Chapel killer and paved the way for the infamy of Jack the Ripper.

In 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray was published, and in 1897, Dracula came out. Both pieces were seen to be heavily influenced by the White Chapel Murders and the public paranoia that accompanied industrial changes in society. In other words, gothic literature shaped how the public was able to understand and consume the White Chapel Murders, and that, in turn, lead to more “serial killers” in gothic literature. It should be noted, though, that these were mostly approximations of humans, except for Poe’s writing, which featured very human men doing very bad things and Gray, who was mostly human at the start. In other words — even if we couldn’t tell these creatures apart from human, there was a certain safety in them not being human. They were still the other. We were still safe. Kind of.

Even in early serial killer books, where the serial killer was a human, they were still separated from the rest of humanity, mostly through mental illness. It wasn’t until The Killer In Me that an author presented a killer as human and as caught up in the day-to-day anxieties of humans as you and me. Which, in my opinion, is what shifts the serial killer narrative from the gothic exploration of other and an invading source of evil into the postmodern exploration of the sickness within society.

From Gothic to Postmodernism and the Obsession with Serial Killers

When looking up The Killer Inside Me I kept coming up with essays about how postmodernism built the serial killer. I don’t just mean the fictional serial killer, but actual serial killers. Okay, postmodernism is a word that is floated around so much that it’s become one of those words that I think I know what it means but I have no clear definition. In one of the essays I read, it was described as the idea that people are shaped not by what they choose to be, but as a reflection of the “noise, variables, and environment” that surrounds them. In other words, we are not choice, but a reflection of our society. The essay goes on to argue that the creation of Jack the Ripper (the myth) created the framework for more serial killers. When these serial killers were deconstructed in media and reconstructed in literature, this paved the road for more brutal serial killers. The essay argued that serial killers had to be more brutal in order to be outside of society or expectation. But the most interesting aspect of postmodernism in the serial killer narrative for me is how the serial killer — the person who refuses societies norms — can reflect the “sick” parts of the society it is in. You see this in books like American Psycho, which is obviously a critique of consumer culture. The person outside of society, refusing to integrate, highlights the worst parts of that society. We see that not only in the exploration of “what made them that way” but also in the sometimes sickeningly logical reasons they have for not engaging in society.

The Killer Inside Me was released in 1952 — post-war America, where two generations of men have seen a lot of death and horror and most people have lived through the Great Depression. American society is trying to go on as nice, polite, and perfect. In other words, people are asked to act as if everything is normal when, in reality, nothing is. The serial killer in this book blows those niceties out of the water.

Finally, Onto the Book!

If I had to pitch The Killer Inside Me it would be Shirley Jackson’s false niceties meets the breakneck pulp of William Lindsay Gresham’s Nightmare Alley. The book is undeniably pulp. I read it in two sittings. (And I am a slow reader that usually takes two or three weeks to finish a can’t-put-down book). It’s simply written, almost in the vein of Hemingway’s “know how complicated something is, then write it simply.” It’s also literary in that it doesn’t follow most standard genre conventions and it focuses more on character then plot.

The plot itself is rather basic: a county sheriff has a dark desire to hurt others, born from his childhood experiences. He meets a prostitute who reminds him of his first lover, and devises a plan to kill her while getting revenge on the wealthy, powerful family who killed his adopted brother. He arranges what looks like a double murder during a payoff gone wrong, killing both the prostitute and her lover (the son of the wealthy business man). But there are questions and people are suspicious of him. He pins the murder on an immigrant boy, killing him and making it look like a guilt-driven suicide. He then sets up a similar double murder as the first, this time between the woman wanting to marry him and the vagabond trying to extort him. While his plan seems to work, local law enforcement has gotten suspicious enough to arrest him. He goes slowly insane in an asylum as he awaits charges. Then…

Okay, I’m going to go back on what I just said. The plot is not basic. It feels inevitable and logical while reading. Small steps and circular logic that makes each act seem like something “normal”, but when you write it all out, it’s insane and almost unbelievable. Which, I think is probably the point of the novel. You fall into Lou Ford’s way of thinking, and it seems like murder, extortion, and abuse are everyday occurrences.

The Use of Idiom

From the first chapter, The Killer In Me focuses on Lou’s use of idioms as a way to subvert social hierarchy and exert power over others. He clearly expresses that his use of idioms is a stand-in for the physical violence he actual desires. In the first chapter he uses idioms and platitudes with the Greek restaurant owner. There’s a sense of superiority in that Lou knows these idioms while the foreigner does not, and it subtly sets up the concept of knowing social expectations as being more important than actually being a good person. The Greek man becomes uncomfortable, and Lou insinuates it’s because he doesn’t understand the idioms, but later we’ll see that everyone is uncomfortable with his strange obsession with idiom. He knows it makes people uncomfortable, but he keeps using the idioms in order to exploit that discomfort.

What is uncomfortable about idioms? In general, nothing. A single well-placed idiom can be eye-roll worthy but also an acceptance of society. But Lou doesn’t stop at one. He pelts them at people, one after the other, as if the distilled wisdom of society are bullets. In other words, from the very beginning, he is advertising that he’s aware that as long as he acts within social expectations, no one can touch him, even if they know something about him is off. He also sets up society (as the idiom is the distillation of society) as being harmful.

All of this is done in a very meta way — Lou Ford talks about how brilliant he is for using idiom as his main form of violence, so that Thompson does not have to. He is aware of his disdain for Texan niceties and how he can use them against others. (This is also seen in the way that he constantly outlines how niceties will protect him from suspicion, such as the refusal to talk about sexual indiscretions outside of marriage). He also sets it up as a way of “dumbing himself down” so that others don’t know how intelligent he is — implying that there is a stupidity in the distillation of folk wisdom.

However, this isn’t the case. It’s clear in other character’s “discomfort” that they see through his ruse. They may not know why he’s weaponizing idiom, but they do see he’s doing it, and that confusion actually breeds more suspicion.

The Unreliable Narrator

I am horrible at detecting unreliable narrators. I am a very trusting person, and I tend to take everyone at their word, even authors. Even serial killer main characters. Because of this, I didn’t even realize Lou was the epitome of unreliable narrator until I started reading critiques of the book. This makes sense. Serial killers have a warped sense of reality and live within their fantastical constructions. Of course we’ll get their skewed version of events. But until the final chapters, Lou’s carefully constructed voice doesn’t sound like that of a madman. It is instead the voice (and logic) of an everyday man. In his plain English (dare I use the highly politicized phrase “common sense”? I do) common sense logic, it makes sense to kill the son of the man who paid to have his brother killed. That’s just revenge. And of course he has to kill the prostitute, but that’s collateral damage. Then every murder after that is covering his steps. It’s all so… logical.

It’s only take a step back, out of the almost charming, sweeping explanations of the narrator, that we remember… wait, he burned the vagabond, pulling him into the narrative, before any of the murders became a possibility. Showing that physical violence before there is any excuse is key to understanding that all of the reasons he uses for his murders are actually just thin veneer covering his homicidal inclinations.

The narration unravels as the book progresses, and in the end it’s easy to stop believing anything Lou says. As we learn more about his traumatic past and his obsession with recreations of the housekeeper who took his virginity, we learn that all of his “reasons” for killing first Joyce and then his fiance, Amy, were bullshit, and he was simply reenacting a childhood violence towards a woman who he thought took away his standing in his father’s eyes.

Then, when he is finally caught, he’s put into an asylum while he awaits charges and the potential rescue of a criminal defense attorney who is known for freeing men just like him. In the asylum he goes mad, envisioning the projection of pictures of Amy on his wall. Lou claims those persecuting him are trying to break him, trying to make him question his own sanity. But things become so slippery that the reader cannot believe anything in the final three chapters. Does the attorney actually get him out of jail? Is Joyce actually alive? Does he burn down his house, taking down everyone involved in the book? Or are these just his imaginings as he’s descending further into madness, locked alone in his room at the asylum?

For me, the unreliable narrator does not only exist to highlight sanity vs. insanity. In The Killer Inside Me, the unreliable narrator emphasizes the lies we tell ourselves that allow us to create a livable society. The ways in which we constantly reframe the chaos of an uncertain world into a framework of sensibility and logic.

The final aspect of this deterioration of the narrator is done in a fully literary way. First, the narrative switches from a first person close POV to that of a first person confessional, breaking the fourth wall of the book and speaking directly to the reader. Then, it descends further into chaos, turning into a second person list-style chapter where the reader becomes fully complicit in Lou’s actions. In this way, the unreliability is not only the narrator, but the narrative itself, which turns the lens away from the writer and character and to the reader and, ultimately into the “real world”.

Brutality — for the time and genre

While reading critiques, I kept coming across people saying how brutal this book was and… I was confused. For me, it didn’t seem particularly brutal. Yes, there was violence in the book, but the narration almost seemed to rush over the violence, describing a few blows from a distance but not delving deeply into the visceral experience of violence.

I realize this can be due to multiple things:

1. The readers of serial killer books come from many different genres. If you tend to read crime or procedural books, which have less on-page graphic violence, you may think The Killer Inside Me is more brutal. However, if you come to it from the horror fiction genre, the brutality may actually seem more subdued.
2. Older fiction may simply not be as brutal as fiction written in the 2000s.

But the real reason I think the violence doesn’t read as violent to me is that Thompson pulls back the narration at times of violence. We are used to books slowing down and wallowing in violence. Things get wet and sticky and… metaphorical. But instead Thompson writes the violence blow for blow, giving it no more importance than drinking a cup of coffee. On closer inspection, he writes sex the same way. Nothing is significant to Lou. Nothing matters. Which is, ultimately a very postmodern look at violence.

Again, this is approached in a brilliantly meta way, with Lou saying:

In lots of books I read, the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point. He’ll start leaving out punctuation and running his words together and babble about stars flashing and sinking into a deep dreamless sea. And you can’t figure out whether the hero’s laying his girl or a cornerstone. I guess that kind of crap is supposed to be pretty deep stuff – a lot of the book reviewers eat it up, I notice. But the way I see it is, the writer is just too goddam lazy to do his job. And I’m not lazy, whatever else I am. I’ll tell you everything.
Thompson, Jim. The Killer Inside Me (p. 147)

Which gets into the postmodern concept of using metaphor to make violence understandable, when it only serves to glorify the violence and make it almost more accessible or desirable. The irony that this judgement comes from a violent character is not lost on me, as if only those who can commit violence can see the stupidity of glorifying the violence through metaphor.

Misogyny and Racism

As most serial killer books are, The Killer Inside Me is filled with misogyny and racism. At the beginning of the book, Lou does away with entire classes of people such as Blacks and Mexicans, as unimportant to society. And then, we do not see them written into the book. Though he lives in west Texas where there is likely a large non-white population, they are simply not written in the book. Which is a sort of violence in and of itself — a very intentional erasure of these groups of people from society, which Lou recognizes he (and all “polite” society) does. Yet there still needs to be an outsider character who the “good members” of society can blame the original murders on. For this, Thompson uses an acceptable other — the Greek foreigner. Still an outsider, but not as outside as a person of color. Someone who has the potential to join society, but is kept out only by his inability to understand the language of society, rather than his appearance as an other.

Similarly to the blatant and recognized racism, the book holds misogyny that Thompson recognizes from the very beginning with Lou’s discussion of (white) females and the niceties they are due even if they are not males who actually matter in society. Although men are killed by Lou, he kills them quickly and dispassionately. Only the murders of Joyce and Amy are drawn out or significant in any way. At the same time, they are the only females in the books. In other words, in Lou’s world, females only exist in the male world in either a bothersome, threatening way or as a means to fulfill his murderous desires. We later learn that his desires are born from his initiation to sex by his housekeeper when he was a boy (teenager? the text is unclear, I read it as a boy, others read it as a teen). This should give the women more significance in the narrative, but instead it further strips them of their individuality or importance, because we see it is NOT the experience with the housekeeper that marred him, but his father’s reaction. It is the loss of his father’s respect that drives him to murder. In other words — him being thrown out of white male society (the only society he is taught that matters) is his driving force. And though he blames women, it is clear to the reader that the real issue comes from the male, patriarchal society itself.

Sexuality and Manhood

Throughout the book, we see Lou’s violence tied to women, but the only women who exist in his life exist in a sexual way. The first encounter with a woman starts with the prostitute Joyce offering him sex, to which he seems willing to take although a bit indifferent until the situation turns violent. Then the sex seems to be something he maybe enjoys (without admitting it) but mostly sees as something he has to give her to keep her quiet about the violence.

Similarly, with his fiancé Amy, we see him almost resentful of the sex he owes her (while still claiming that it is a “perk” of their relationship). It is, once again, only when their relationship turns violent and she begins to allow him to beat her before sex that he seems to enjoy or at least accept their relationship.

In many ways, the book seems to imply that Lou knows he should want sex, and that he’s fine with having it, but his real desire is for violence. The sex is just a byproduct he uses to keep the violence under wraps. This is counter to the conventional serial killer story where the sexual violence is the point. In this narrative, the sex is very subtly separated from the violence in order to bring into critique the concept of manhood and the desire for sex.

The reader learns that when Lou was a teen, his father gave him a vasectomy. It is implied that this happened around the time he murdered his first victim. Amy still believes his adopted brother killed the young girl, and that his father gave him a vasectomy as a sort of preventative cure to his sexuality. But this seems to be what he wants her to believe, and the reader actually becomes suspicious that the father performed the vasectomy as a sort of punishment when he caught his son with his housekeeper. (Who we learn the father was sexually and sadistically involved with). So the vasectomy was not preventative or a cure for his sickness, but actually, perhaps the source of his illness.

Later, he has had sex with Joyce and when he returns to Amy he is unable to get an erection. This clues her into the idea that he’s been sleeping with Joyce and his inability to “perform” threatens to unravel the entire cover he’s built. He later injects himself with a cocktail of vitamins and hormones that gives him a constant erection, giving him the ability to perform at will, although ultimately becoming an annoyance and distraction for him.

This becomes a not-so-subtle subtext that the ill defined and unobtainable “manhood” in postwar America is the source of mental anguish in young men that eventually causes them to forego a society that is built on the concept of masculinity. It is a concept that is probably worth exploring further in the current deepening crisis of manhood.

Overall, the book seemed to be a critique of the niceties of society that would allow a serial killer to flourish while, at the same time, creating the situation in which he might be made.

I could probably keep musing on this book for pages, but I have to find a stopping point. There are a few parts of the book that I did not understand and could not find a critique of, so I’d love to know what you thought… mainly, what was up with the chapter with the psychiatrist who comes to visit? Was he sent by the other men in society? Or was he a figment of Lou’s imagination? What was he supposed to represent?

I think my next book will be The Serial Killer’s Wife by Alice Hunter… moving back into more contemporary books written by women. However, I’ve loved this jog into the history of the serial killer novel, and find The Killer Inside Me to be a do-not-miss if you are reading ANYTHING about postmodern serial killer fiction.

Sources

(An ongoing list of sources used in the Serial on Serial Killers)

Jack the Ripper and the social imagination of the serial killer:

• Deconstructing “Jack”: How Jack the Ripper Became More Fiction Than Fact
• Ripper Records: Fiction

Postmodernism and the circular creation of the serial killer:

• Aestheticization of Serial Killers in Contemporary Crime Literature and Film
• Fiction and Reality: Serial Killers as a Product of Postmodern Fiction

Critique of Serial Killer Fiction

• Literary Serial Killer Fiction: The Evolution of a Genre
• Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction
• Serial Killer Fiction

Slashers

• The Literary Case for Slasher Films
• The 21st Century Slasher Novel
• Selling Slashers to Teen Girls