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 she comes to fiction with a deep understanding of the criminal mind and the social fallout related to those crimes — especially when it comes to how the crimes can effect the family.

Before I get into the book, I want to point out that I have read three books in a month. Me. Super-slow-reader-Koji has read almost a book a week. Please congratulate me.

I also wanted to dive back into some concepts from Philip Simpson’s Psycho Paths that I didn’t have time to get into last week.

Five Types of Serial Killer Books

The four “types” of serial killer fiction come from the book Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction by Philip Simpson. I’ll be honest, I’m about two-thirds of the way through the book. It’s a heavy text that makes my brain swim when I’m reading it. But it has a lot of insight into how serial killers were presented in fiction and film. The book was published in 2000, though. Which means it looks mostly at books and films from the 1960s-1990s. And ohhhh boy, how have things changed since the 1990s! But it still gives a strong foundation for contextualizing the shared social mythos of the serial killer. One of it’s strengths is in the five types of serial killer stories.

Simpson’s five types of serial killer stories:

1. Neo-Gothic. This relies heavily on Gothic and horror genre conventions. It focuses on the relationship between the killer and the victim as a type of dangerous seduction. It uses haunted landscapes, violations of the taboo, and transgressing boundaries. Simpson’s examples were The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper and Kiss the Girls. Each of these books made use of tight, claustrophobic spaces that echo the gothic atmosphere, dungeons that echo the gothic castle, and an intriguing bordering of the natural world with the developed.
2. The profiler against the killer. This genre was lead by Thomas Harris (Red Dragon, Silence of the Lambs). It features a profiler who works with the police but is somehow separate from the police — retired, a student, somehow an outcast. The books look at how rigid rules create both the profiler and the killer, and how both must operate outside these rules in order to uphold the social system. The profiler often has an almost super-human empathy that allows them to make connections and mirrors the killer so thoroughly that they risk their own self (in society) in order to stop him. Or, in the case of a female profiler, develop an empathetic link to the victims. Another film example of this would be Se7en.
3. The detective vs. the killer. This is perhaps a sub-genre of the profiler against the killer. Instead of a superpowered profiler, the protagonist is a detective. This follows traditional crime fiction genre patterns and allows equal text to both the killer and the investigator. (Although I would argue that it leans heavier on the personal transformation of the investigator as instigated by the transgression of the killer). In these stories you may start to get more of a emphasis on the victims as opposed to the killers. Simpson notes this is especially so with the rise of women writers who wrote serial killers and the female detective, such as Patricia Cornwell’s From Potter’s Field in which the detective fully rejects the serial killer as important in favor of giving his latest victim a name and proper burial.
4. The “Psycho Profile” centers upon the killer as the protagonist. These stories are usually told in first person pov from the pov of the killer, his close friends, lovers, or acquaintances. Sometimes from the pov of the victim. It has several sub-“genres”:
   • Wilding stories. Wilding is a concept from the 1980s that was originally applied to urban crime with racial overtones. It is defined as brutal, apparently motiveless attacks committed on strangers. And from here we see a transition of the serial killer as a brilliant monster who is stuck in ritual and symbolism to a more lizard-brain, senseless form of killing. This is seen in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, American Psycho, and Zombie. The killer has no pattern or motive, and so they are nearly unstoppable, which puts less emphasis on the institutions of police and FBI and more emphasis on social values and individualism.
   • The family’s perspective. Here we have the social fallout of living with a serial killer. How that changes a person (the idea of social infection that goes back to gothic ideals in literature), and how their acts shape their family, town, and nation. We have stories like My Sister the Serial Killer, this week’s The Serial Killer’s Wife, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. Some of the emphasis is on the serial killer, but more is how they shape their life outside of the act of killing.
   • The victim’s perspective. Here we see the aftermath and imprint of the killer, usually on victims who have escaped the the murder. Think The Poughkeepsie Tapes or Woman of the Hour.
5. Mytho-apocalyptic. This recontextualizes the serial killer from the historical moment to give the killer a divine status as a demonic messenger. In these stories, the killer rises from death, either staying alive as a part of folk imagination or literally rising from death in a number of sequels. I suppose this is where my upcoming novella, Hold My Heart sits. Ironically, up until now, it’s been one of my least favorite type of serial killer story, and I’ve more concentrated on the psycho profile.

This is a loose and dirty understanding of Simpson’s framing. For example, he puts Se7en in the mytho-apocalyptic category. But it’s important to note a single story can fall into multiple categories, such as being both neo-gothic and a profiler story.

In this series, I’m focusing on the psycho profile sub-genre. (If we are calling serial killer novels a genre… as so many point out, and this framework shows, a serial killer can be pulled into and utilized well in many genres — a serial killer can be the star in a western, criminal procedural, horror, literary, sci fi, thriller etc.). I started by looking for female serial killer books, but along the way I shifted my desires and I am looking more for first person pov stories that are told by the serial killer, in which the serial killer is human or mostly human. I definitely want to get more of a perspective of what characters women are writing in the 2020s and where the genre is going. Which leads us to this week’s book.

The Serial Killer’s Wife

I’ll have to admit I didn’t really enjoy this book the way I’ve enjoyed the past two. I think that comes back to the concept that serial killer novels can inhabit so many different genres, and this genre wasn’t really for me. I enjoy the ratcheted tension and dread of horror. Sometimes I like the nail-biting physical danger of the thriller. I also like the metaphor and wordplay of literary. Domestic drama is probably one of my least favorite genres. That being said, the book has over 25k ratings on Goodreads averaging over three stars and has been made into a television series, so plenty of people enjoyed it.

The book opens with Beth getting visited by the police who take her husband in for questioning about the murder of his previous fiancé which happened eight years earlier. The book unfolds slowly, showing how the arrest upends Beth’s seemingly perfect small-village life. We see how people who have never fully accepted her (as a newcomer to the village) are now suspicious of her. Some people unexpectedly befriend her, but seemingly just to get closer to the drama. Throughout the book she has a blossoming relationship with a recent widower.

The book’s worth seems dependent on the final few “reveals”. People who found these unexpected and satisfying seemed to really like the book. Those who found them predictable or unsatisfying seemed to not like the book.

In the end we see that Beth knew Tom had killed his fiancé for about a year. During that year, she had taken matters into her own hands, first killing the wife of the next man she hoped to marry (to make sure her child would grow up with a present father figure) and then tipping off the victim’s father to the suspicious emails Tom had been sending from her email address to make people think she was still alive. In other words, Beth is cold and calculating, and she had planned on Tom getting caught and convicted as well as marrying Adam.

I think the problem I had with the twist is that in order to pull it off, Beth had to be an aloof, unlikable character throughout the book. This means that the first half of the book, when I suppose I was supposed to be feeling sympathy for her, I felt very little. A certain narrative distance was required in order to not reveal too much of Beth’s plans, and I prefer a very deep POV. Here we get an unreliable narrator who is specifically concealing things in order to deceive the reader. I much prefer the unreliable narrator who has a twisted view of reality that they fully believe.

The Slowness of the “After” Drama

The Serial Killer’s Wife is a post-kill book. Any actual murders are flashbacks. I feel like most books that take this approach end up being very slow. We Need to Talk About Kevin is another good example of this. In these books, the violent acts have already been committed and there is little physical risk of harm. From the first few chapters, Tom is in custody. He will not be out murdering, and it is fairly clear he won’t be released, which makes any sense of danger fully social. It becomes a book of how do we treat those who are periphery to violent acts and whether these people knew.

The book seems to emphasize the idea that we can’t know anyone. Beth seems like the perfect grieving wife, but she’s not. Julia seems like the supportive friend, but she’s not. Tom seemed like the perfect husband, but he’s a serial killer. The book depends on this “after” drama as opposed to the tension of the actual murders. I do think this can be done well, but I feel like, for me, The Serial Killer’s Wife didn’t go deep enough into the fallout. Beth’s reactions seem superficial (which we learn why later) and none of the other characters are fleshed out enough for me to care about them. Because, ultimately, Beth doesn’t care about them.

Unlikable Characters

I am not sure if all of the characters were supposed to be unlikable in this book, or if it was just that they were so surface level that I found no way to connect with them. All any of the characters seemed to care about was their social appearance in their small town. This could have been a very powerful motivation and story if we were sometimes allowed to see the masks slip and see the real characters in contrast to their appearances. But it doesn’t seem like there’s any point where I read a real or authentic character. It is all just public niceties, even in Beth’s narration. One might compare this to Shirley Jackson’s emphasis on how we are publicly nice to people while we swallow our actual emotions. But it is only effective when we get a real, empathetic glimpse at the real people underneath, which we never did.

Dependency on Tropes

Ironically, this book felt like it depended on tropes about serial killers in a way that other books have not. It was as if there was a checklist that Hunter went down:

• sexually violent
• first kill is an “accident”
• childhood abuse
• repetition of the initial kill
• having a violent impulse they try to keep down
• going to a sex worker as a “safe” outlet for their needs

Each of these aspects was put into the story, but it wasn’t expanded on in a meaningful way or really at all. Despite all of these features, Tom remained flat and without a personality beyond the told (not shown) “perfect husband” and “violent murderer”. Perhaps it is strange that I’m unsatisfied with tropes. After all, what fascinates me about serial killers in fiction is the social imagination. In other words — its all those short cuts and tropes that we use to explain this behavior and to trigger the social imagination of it. In other words, I’m a huge fan of the tropes. But I think to craft a really engaging story about a serial killer, the author has to go into the trope — they have to signal it and then subvert it. Or reinforce it. Or do… something… with it. But in this story it seemed like the trope was the end goal, not the starting point.

This is one of the reasons why I’m actually hesitant about professionals writing fiction. I remember being told on social media a few years back that only mental health professionals should write characters with mental health issues — that they had a deep understanding of the issues, but people with mental health issues should not write about them because they were much more likely to write about stereotypes that could harm the community. This infuriated me because I had a mental health professional telling me I couldn’t be trusted to tell my own story. Instead, the professional was supposed to speak for me. But what I often see told by mental health professionals (not all, definitely not all) are somewhat shallow stories that fail to interact with the social imagination or the reality of people who have these illnesses.

The professional (in mental health or crime) has access to so many stories as well as years of professional experience built up with these stories. They can often be the ones who can really tell an in-depth, meaningful story. But just as often, it feels more like reading a list from the DSM-5 than an actual story. It is a conglomeration of stories instead of a single person. It is a statistic told in narrative form rather than an individual.

An Alternative

I’m sorry to say I did not really enjoy this book. As I said before, plenty of people loved it and it did very well commercially. So I may be missing something or perhaps it just wasn’t meant for me. I will say that if you want an awesome book that deals with the family of a serial killer, check out My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite instead. I feel like My Sister, the Serial Killer goes deep into the social and familial fallout of a serial killer. It also follows the characters during the murders, instead of after the arrest. So there’s much higher tension and investment from the reader.