The Book

The book is broken up into six parts, each named after the stages of decay. The first chapter of each part is told from the perspective of the body as it goes through the decay, wondering who it was in life and if it will ever be found.

The decay is mirrored in the meat of the story which follows Birdie staying with an abusive boyfriend as she works through the guilt of her son’s death. Most chapters are told through Birdie’s point of view as she hides her partner’s abuse and suspicious activities from herself. A few chapters are told through her best friend who tries to throw her a life rope, and many chapters are told through the eyes of each victim as she is brutally murdered by Birdie’s boyfriend.

Throughout the book there is some suspense — will Birdie be the next victim? Will any of the women get away? Will the boyfriend be caught? The answers to these, given up in the final two parts, are unexpected and yet fit perfectly. The ending is open ended. Maybe Birdie becomes a murderer. Maybe she’s caught by the cops. Maybe she finally forgives herself and heals. It’s up to the reader to decide.

As much as the book is about Birdie’s perspective (rather than the serial killer’s), it is also about her guilt and shame and the expectations we put on mothers. But of course I’m going to concentrate on the serial killer of it all.

Shifting the Narrative: Focusing On Victims

This book did the one thing I was asking for during this whole process: it shifted the POV to the victims. I read so many genres that featured serial killers over the past year, and almost all of them have focused either on the serial killer (how they were formed, what allows them to kill, or just gleeful viciousness) OR on the person who catches the serial killer: detective, cop, psychologist, love interest(!?). Occasionally you get “the girl who lived” — that final victim who is rescued.

I get it — it’s difficult to tell a story from the POV of someone who ends up dead, let along ten people who end up dead. But Murray manages to do it. These chapters that show each killing aren’t (usually) told from the killer’s POV, but instead they manage to set each victim in a life of their own. We get a glimpse of these women. We get a hint of who they love and what they value. We even manage to see hints of the impact they have on the world. For me, these chapters were not an interlude showing the violence of the killer, but the beating heart of the story. Each possibility snuffed out was attached to a life and being with emotions. Each death had a different person with different reactions. While it was a repetition for the killer, it was fresh and new for each victim. I think the only other media I experienced with this focus on the victims while still being about the serial killer would be Woman of the Hour, which I would say Shoot Me in the Face on a Beautiful Day has a lot in common with.

I think there has been a natural progression in the serial killer novel that, probably, many archetypes follow:

• First, the novel simply had the serial killer as the “monster” in a horror book or villain in a crime novel. In these books, having the killer was sensational enough to hold the reader’s attention. It was a unique kind of human monster, crossing the gothic barrier of the supernatural villain into the realm of the human.
• The next three came around the same time, overlapping each other:
  • Trying to understand the killer. We got their past, their passion and their why. Books told from their POV or their family’s POV. Books that had strong flashbacks to an abused childhood. We wanted to understand what could take a person that had the same possibilities as us and turn them into someone who could continuously kill. We focused on the rhythm. The repetition. The… satisfaction?
  • The rise of the psychologist — the mirror of the killer that showed the dark possibility in each of us. This was a natural step in understanding the killer — we needed an antihero that could understand the killer. Someone that showed we are all one rejection of social expectations away from becoming a killer ourselves. Someone who was willing to sacrifice themselves to understand the killer. I suppose this was almost a rejection of the desire to understand the killer — showcasing the dangers of this line of questioning.
  • Books that showcased the “how” of the killer. These books showed flaws in society that allowed killers to get away with a lifetime of murders — whether it was poor policework, neighborhoods that no longer talk, or other cracks in society.
• Then came the “takeover” of the archetype. The traditional male archetype was explored by transgressive writers. Feminists. Queer. Anarchists. From that you get a few perspectives (and to be clear, we’re still very much here, and this is what I want to read more of, especially queer takes):
  • Feminist rage. The killer we rooted for. Sometimes the vigilante killer, sometimes just a female killer that can be as killer-ish as the men.
  • Playing with genre. Serial killer romance. Serial killer erotica. Serial killer humor. A serial killer is just another man and can be put into any genre. There is no longer anything special or off-limits about him.
• The victim as the main character.

Of course in each of these shifts, there seemed to be the ground-breaking books followed by commercial lit that capitalizes on the concept. But what really boggles my mind that serial killer characters started over 150 years ago, and it took until the 2020s for us to start focusing on victims. Then again, that seems to be society.

Writing a Hole: Subverting Expectations in the Genre

In one of the bookish servers I’m part of, we were discussing writing a story that is a hole. We came up with all sorts of ways we would approach a story that is a hole, but couldn’t agree on one way that would achieve it without writing the thing that should be there. A few weeks after that conversation, I read Shoot Me in the Face on a Beautiful Day. Halfway through, I remember gasping. This was it! This was the hole. A book that has a serial killer and is about the serial killer, but never focuses on him. Throughout the whole book there is the expectation that his actions will be explained. That he will come into focus. But he remains a force, not a character. While the book had obviously been written before the hole discussion, I had the pleasure of asking Murray if she realized she had achieved a hole. Her answer was that she hadn’t meant to… it was just that his story wasn’t interesting.

I think that’s a bold thing to say, and it’s only because of the history of the genre having already explored the what and how and why that allows us to now say, “he’s no longer interesting.” The lives he touches matter, and his influence is just an event, not a story. In that way, this book feels very much like a conversation with the genre. While I wish we had always put our interest in the victims, perhaps it is a state we can only arrive at after the confusion and disbelief and horror has been stripped away.

Enabling the Killer: The Blind Hole of Grief

While each mini-story, told in a scene of violence, kept me glued to this book, they didn’t overshadow the story of Birdie. Birdie is the countless women who live with violent men. She’s the one on the television being asked, “how could you not know?” She’s the one we blame for not stopping him. I suppose her story has been told in other books — the sister or mother or wife who didn’t know she was living with a serial killer. But the thing about this book is how strongly it focuses in on Birdie’s guilt and despair which blinds her to her boyfriend’s actions. It doesn’t feel the need to focus on all the signs Birdie misses and instead ventures into the story of her guilt, shame, and pain.

It’s easy to say that Birdie stays with her violent boyfriend as a type of penance — she thinks she deserves abuse because she failed her child, and because all of society is telling her that she’s a horrible person. But that would be too clean and easy. As much as Birdie’s relationship with the killer is a type of penance, it’s also desperation for connection. She honestly believes that he’s all she deserves. He’s the only one who will love her after the crime she’s committed. What’s particularly heart-wrenching is seeing the way this belief is supported throughout the book — an ex-husband who cannot look at her, a mother and sister who won’t take her calls, and an entire city who paints her as a villain. Of course her only option for love and acceptance is another villain.

I think this storyline complicated the question of how a killer’s partner can stay by their side. It showed not only the blind hole of Birdie’s grief, but also what society’s cold rejection can push us to. The story of abuse was poignant and real, and layered perfectly with Birdie as the “beard” for the killer.

Of Mice and Men Who Don’t Deserve a Beautiful Ending

The title of book comes from a scene where the killer feels the police closing in on him. Getting more paranoid, he becomes more physically abusive towards Birdie, entertaining the idea of making her one of his victims. While having a picnic, he tells her that a day may come soon when he’ll want her to shoot him. She thinks it is his depression and lack of self-worth talking — something she has been trying to “save” him from the entire book. But the audience knows that he’s looking for the easy way out — death instead of prison, no atonement, and a perfect, beautiful death at that.

The scene brought up huge Of Mice and Men vibes for me — the scene where George kills Lenny, not because Lenny is a violent man, but because he lives in a world where he’ll never be understood. Once captured, his death would be violent and at the hands of men who did not understand or love him. George does Lenny a kindness because the world is not built for Lenny. In Shoot Me in the Face, the killer is asking for that same kindness. But he isn’t given it.

I think parallel between those two scenes is the closest we get to feeling any kind of empathy or understanding of the killer. He wants to be forgiven and killed by a hand that loves him. When not given that, he goes out and kills again — this time killing the woman that will lead to his eventual arrest and conviction. I’m not sure if this was meant to bring up a discussion of mental health and serial killers, and it’s hard to imagine Murray comparing her killer with Lenny, perhaps one of the most loveable and heart-wrenching characters ever written. But it still brings up the question of who this is made for and how we can pull in those who are outside of society — if we even can.

The moment is one of the brief moments of honesty between Birdie and her boyfriend, where his introspection allows him to not be an asshole to her (although it is driven by pure selfishness). It brings up Bonnie and Clyde, us against the world vibes, except Birdie is no Bonnie. She has no idea of who she’s harboring or what she’s allowing him to do… or does she?

It’s an infuriating moment because he’s no Lenny and he’s not even a Clyde. He’s just some asshole killing women. And he doesn’t deserve to be shot in the face on a beautiful day. And that — such anger that I don’t even think he deserves a pretty death — sticks with me over a month later.

Serial Killing as an Infection

Finally, let’s talk about the ending. The killer is captured and Birdie maintains his innocence. She blinds herself to the mountain of evidence and continues listening to one of the only people who has “loved” her after her tragedy. She even goes so far as to accept a sample of his ejaculatory fluids (that he gave while imagining killing her) and is trying to find a woman to kill so she can make it look like the man responsible for the murders is still at large, potentially getting her partner’s conviction overturned.

At that point, as she’s hunting down women and trying to re-enact the exact type of murder her partner committed, she has to know, deep down, that he’s guilty. And yet she doesn’t say no. She finds not one, but two potential victims, and keeps trying. With the second victim, it’s unclear what will happen — whether she will actually follow through and kill her, give herself up to the police, or run away. Or who knows — maybe her and this woman will get into an abusive relationship with Birdie now being the abusive one?

What we do know is we’ve seen a woman so broken down by not only abuse but social ostracism, that her ethical compass has completely malfunctioned. The Birdie at the beginning of the book feels bad about her role in her son’s death. She holds down a job. Feels a sense of loyalty to her only friend. She has a sense of right and wrong. By the end of the book we hope there’s still a kernel of that morality in her — a glimmer that will stop her from killing to defend a man who never loved her — but the hope for that is slim because we’ve seen the way the shame he plays on has consumed her. In this we see how cycles of abuse play out — how the abused becomes the abuser. But we also see the serial killer concept of serial killing as an infection.

Going back to the gothic, the vampires that the serial killer was based on could kill, but they could also create a being in their own image. Although this has been shown in movies and books over and over, it took Shoot Me in the Face spelling it out for me to really pick up on the concept of serial killing as an infection spread through abuse. And perhaps that is one of the reasons readers are continually fascinated by it — because it can spread. Because it can touch anyone.

Signing Off

While this won’t be the last serial killer book I read (I still want queer perspectives and the cosmic horror take), I do think I’ve come full circle with my exploration. I also think it’s time for me to start reading books on other topics again. I’ve explored most of the contemporary takes on serial killers in literature, and I hope I’ve shared some interesting perspectives on the archetype as a fictional character. I think the 2000’s have been an interesting time for the character, and I hope there are more stories that focus on victims instead of the killers. But for now I won’t be sharing as many blog posts on the topic (I think I’ve said most of what I can say) and I hope to start another deep-dive topic for the coming year.

Until then, check out the rest of the books I critiqued:

Title	Author	Gender of Author	Gender of Killer	Status	Year
The Killer Inside Me	Jim Thompson	man	man	read	1952
A Good Man Is Hard To Find	Flannery O’Connor	woman	man	reading	1953
The Wasp Factory	Iain Banks	man	It’s complicated?	read	1984
Perfume	Patrick Suskind				1985
Zombie	Joyce Carol Oates	woman	man		1995
the sluts	dennis cooper				2004
Sharp Objects	Gillian Flynn	woman	woman (child)	read	2006
Heartsick	Chelsea Cain	woman	woman		2007
Child 44	Tom Rob Smith	man	man	read	2008
My Pet Serial Killer	Michael J. Seidlinger				2013
Bones and All	Camille DeAngelis	woman	various	read	2015
There’s Someone Inside Your House	Stephanie Perkins	woman	man (teen)	read	2017
My Sister the Serial Killer	Oyinkan Braithwaite	woman	woman	read	2018
A Certain Hunger	Chelsea G. Summers	woman	woman	read	2019
They Never Learn	Layne Fargo				2020
The Serial Killer’s Wife	Alice Hunter	woman	man	read	2021
My Men	Victoria Kielland				2021
So Beautiful and Elastic	Gary J. Shipley				2023
Butcher and Blackbird	Brynne Weaver	woman	various (mostly men)	read	2023
Kill for Love	Laura Picklesimer				2023
Maeve Fly	CJ Leede				2023
Crushing Snails	Emma E. Murray	woman	woman (teen)	read	2024
Love Letters to a Serial Killer	Tasha Coryell	woman	woman	read	2024
I Was a Teenage Slasher	Stephen Graham Jones				2024
Vanishing Daughters	Cynthia Pelayo				2025
Shoot Me In The Face On A Beautiful Day	Emma Murray	woman	man	read	2025

And don’t forget to check out my own serial killer book: