Phil Simpson is currently Department Chair of Communications, Humanities, Foreign Languages, and Prep Writing and Reading at the Palm Bay campus of Brevard Community College in Florida. He graduated from Eastern Illinois with a B.A. in English in 1986 and an M.A. in English in 1989. He received his doctorate from Southern Illinois University in 1996. He began work as a full-time English and Humanities professor at Brevard Community College in 1997. He lives in Malabar, Florida, with his partner Davina, her two children, two horses, two dogs, four cats, a bird, and a guinea pig.

Phil's book Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction was published in 2000 by Southern Illinois University Press. His essays of literary, cultural, and/or cinematic criticism have appeared in journals such as Cineaction, Paradoxa, Clues, and Notes on Contemporary Literature; encyclopedias such as Twenty-First Century British and Irish Novelists (2003), The Guide to United States Popular Culture (2001), War and American Popular Culture (1999), and The Encyclopedia of Novels into Film (1998); and books such as The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film (2003); Car Crash Culture (2002); Jack Nicholson: Movie Top Ten (2000); and Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media (1999).

 

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In fiction and film/television, the serial killer has very quickly become an eminently marketable form of contemporary folk legend. Actual serial killers such as Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Kemper, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ed Gein, Charles Starkweather, Charlie Manson, Henry Lee Lucas, and their ilk are slowly metamorphosing into immortal (and profitable) cultural icons, in much the same way that whoever murdered at least three and probably more Victorian prostitutes on the eve of the mass-media age has become Jack the Ripper. Concomitantly, fiction writers are creating serial killer scenarios loosely based on the media-purveyed exploits of the actual multiple murderers. These real-life antecedents of Uncle Charlie, Norman Bates, Leatherface, Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Francis Dolarhyde, Jame Gumb, Hannibal Lecter, etc., are revitalized and particularized mythic villains for an anomic world that is haunted by the macrocosmic specters of war, genocide, gynocide, terrorism, and random violent crime but ironically constructed from the institutionalized ideologies which make all of these possible. The literature and legends that have coalesced around uber-criminals answer the human need to personify free-floating fears, aggravated by the perplexing indeterminacy of the postmodern world, into a specific, potentially confinable, yet still ultimately evil, threat. The marauding serial killer of the late 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s encodes, deliberately or otherwise, many of our cultural phobias in his polysemous narrative representation in fiction and film.

The serial killer narratives take many forms of varying levels of complexity and appear in many media. They can be as succinct and brutally straightforward as the much-maligned “serial killer trading cards” of a few years back. Or, they can be as artistically complex as the metafiction of a Paul West. But no matter what shape these narratives are presented in, they are hegemonic. In this country alone, especially since the early- to mid-1960s, literally dozens of fiction and non-fiction accounts of serial murder have attracted enough public and critical attention so as to warrant serious academic study.

Serial Murder and Folklore

Historically, tales of multiple murder have always attracted a disproportionate amount of public attention and often appear in oral folklore. Brian Meehan notes, “There is . . . a natural affinity between folklore and savage crime” (3). This may be so because folklore, essentially verbal in nature, considers repetition of key images and phrases a vital structural component to begin with, and so finds a metaphoric parallel to a series of murders. W.F.H. Nicolaisen professes that counting is equivalent to narrating in the European mind set (77-89): an applicable concept to explain the kinship between multicide and narrative. Another explanation is that folklore invests otherwise inexplicable phenomena such as multiple murder with significance through the communally shared act of narration. Whatever the explanation, however, folklore and murder have always been interdependent, as one can readily observe in the wealth of story and rhyme surrounding such notorious historical figures as Gille de Rais, Vlad Tepes, H.H. Holmes, Lizzie Borden, and Belle Gunness. It is surely no accident that these murderers often become associated with monstrous and/or supernatural traits drawn from folklore. Philip Jenkins argues that serial killers “provide a means for society to project its worst nightmares and fantasies, images that in other eras or other regions might well be fastened onto supernatural or imaginary folk-devils—vampires, werewolves, witches, evil sorcerers, conspiratorial Jews” (Using Murder 112-3). But it took the rise of a modern mass-media before specific cases could transcend their singular temporal and sociopolitical contexts to become elements of a truly global contemporary mythology—heinous villainy masquerading behind a Norman Bates- or Ted Bundy-like façade of bland normality. In the contemporary mythic paradigm, the banality and latent ubiquity of evil are cosmological twins.

The supernatural image of the human/monster hybrid is, of course, central to the project of rendering the serial killer into a proper folklore demon. As Lutz Rohrich writes, “In . . . legend the demon is timeless and permanent; it existed before humans and will outlast them. At the legend’s end the demon can remain a threat to the future” (24-5). Yet in an age where metaphysical evil has been largely dethroned by notions of psychological dysfunction—where Grendel and his monstrous mother have been narrowly reconfigured into psychosexually troubled Norman Bates and his “castrating” but clearly human mother—it is not easy to preserve the dark grandeur reserved for folkloric monsters. The serial killer nevertheless achieves legendary status, largely through clever textual strategies that relocate the monstrous face behind the human one—the skull fleetingly visible behind Norman Bates’s features in the final moments of Psycho. The serial killer is a postmodern shapeshifter or changeling child whose spiritual essence was kidnapped by pornography or bad genes or abusive parents and replaced with the soul of Cain. Any given killer has one pleasant or at least non-threatening face with which to conduct public negotiations, and another evil face with which to terrify helpless victims. This doubling strategy allows inhuman evil to lurk behind human “normalcy,” simply because the serial killer’s actions by their very nature cannot help but propel him beyond the liminal into what Noel Carroll identifies as the interstitial territory reserved for the most egregious taboo violators. Caroll describes horrific monsters as “the mixture of what is normally distinct” (33), which in turn sounds similar to the devoured/devouring world trope in carnivalesque folk culture, where the limits between human flesh and the rest of the world are blurred or erased altogether. So, in spite of the moral pollution surrounding him and his transgressive actions, and the textual demonization, the serial killer remains at least marginally human. Indeed, so have the folk monsters of previous generations, such as the werewolf and vampire.

The fictional representations of the contemporary serial killer obviously plunder the vampire narratives of the past century and a half, such as those authored by Coleridge, Byron, Polidori, Prest, Wordsworth, Stoker, LeFanu, Wilde, Poe, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Henry James, and D.H. Lawrence, for suitably lurid and pseudo-supernatural embroidery. These vampire-centered texts, in turn, are conflations of Eastern European vampire folklore and Romantic/Gothic narrative conventions. Richard Gottlieb and Margaret L. Carter in combination have identified six major features of the earlier vampire folk tradition. First, the vampire is undead and intent on continuing an inherently parasitic relationship with the living. Second, his body is not decayed or decomposed. Third, he is a tormented outcast. Fourth, he experiences conflict over his compulsion to cannibalize the living. Fifth, he destroys with his mouth, creating more vampires even as he nourishes himself. Lastly, he longs for death. One would be hard-pressed to find a better catalog of metaphors for the darker aspects of Romanticism, i.e., the Gothic. According to Carol Seen’s study, nineteenth century writers freely adapted the folk legends to their dramatic needs, creating characters who were either literal vampires or ordinary human beings modeled on vampires (25-6). In the figure of the serial killer, whether he is presented in fictional or tabloid “true crime” fashion, we see a similar human monster, textually coded as generically supernatural but, in part, vampiristic.

Vampires and serial killers are, in part, metaphors designed for arriving at an intuitive explanation of the human ability to murder other humans for symbolic reasons having nothing to do with literal survival. In many ways, they are low-rent versions of Dostoevsky’s fictional treatise on “motiveless” murder, Crime and Punishment. Whereas Dostoevsky’s novel is essentially an interior monologue remote from the fleshy urgency of non-intellectual existence, the folk demonology represented by the pantheon of shape-shifters and blood-drinking monsters performs its bloody antics on a public stage for public consumption, even as it consumes the public. Mikhail Bakhtin distinguishes the medieval mindset by its “drama of bodily life (copulation, birth, growth, eating, drinking, defecation)” (88). The survival of this mindset into the modern age has been made possible by aperiodic exposure to the devouring appetite inherent in what Bakhtin calls the “grotesque body” that “swallows the world and is itself swallowed by the world” (317) in a reciprocal act of energy transfer, but with one vital difference. As Maggie Kilgour observes, the modern age reconfigures Bakhtin’s “ideal of a cooperative body” into representations of “all relations as not symbiotic but predatory” (145). The gaping mouth (the medieval hellmouth) is the primary symbol of the grotesque body, the same as for the devouring werewolf and vampire. The mouth functions as the portal of consumption that ingests the life force as it rends it. Oral cruelty is inextricably linked to a pre-modern consciousness, which our modern culture longs for the more technologized we become. The serial killer, associated as he so often is, with biting and eating, serves as the engine which drives our attraction/repulsion toward an elemental existence where one may be free of civilization and its discontents but also possibly killed and eaten. Those killers who evoke this ambivalent frisson the strongest are the ones who will endure in legend: Vlad Tepes, Gilles de Rais, Countess Bathory, Jack the Ripper. In our own modern era, H.H. Holmes’s serial wife-killing in his dark castle, Ed Gein’s serial grave-robbing, Ted Bundy’s biting a hunk of flesh out of a victim’s buttocks, and Jeffrey Dahmer’s eating a human biceps rouse primitive awareness of the voracious appetite of hellmouth. This arousal of primal emotions is only enhanced by technological advances in communication. When we read about the latest serial killer, or see him posture for the court cameras, we are watching the legend-making process in utero. In any age, fictional narrative steals away the murderer from the source incident and creates a new panoply of incarnations for him in folklore.

The formal study of folklore makes clear distinctions between myths and legends, rumors and reports. In this context, Bill Ellis’s use of the term contemporary mythologies “to refer to global scenarios accepted on faith by subcultures who use them to link and give ultimate meaning to puzzling events” is best fitting. The contemporary mythologies arise from “clusters of legends, rumors, and beliefs [that] collaborate with other kinds of stories or bits of information to form global bodies of lore” (43-4). What Jan Harold Brunvand calls an “urban legend” would be a particular legend or rumor that contributes to the global body of lore. In Brunvand’s words: “Urban legends belong to the subclass of folk narratives, legends, that—unlike fairy tales—are believed, or at least believable, and that—unlike myths—are set in the recent past and involve normal human beings rather than ancient gods or demigods. Legends are folk history, or rather quasi-history. As with any folk legends, urban legends gain credibility from specific details of time and place or from references to source authorities” (3). To elaborate, an urban legend is best understood as a focused narrative expression of a free-floating social anxiety, such as the fear of strangers in a society where physical mobility is essentially unchecked and where the next-door neighbors can do more than drive down the property values. The legendary dimensions of the serial killer are thus ensured by his social invisibility, which imparts to him by proxy a pseudo-supernatural, shape-shifting ability carried over from the vampire and werewolf tales of previous generations.

It is also helpful to distinguish between contemporary legend and rumor. A contemporary legend, according to Patricia Turner, is a well-formed narrative held by its performer to be true or at least believable, whereas a rumor is “more open-ended and unspecific and usually lack[s] narrative chronology” (78). In either case, a contemporary mythology is an attempt to incorporate these discrete bits of rumor and legend into a totalizing narrative, or what the hard sciences are fond of calling a “unified field” theory. In other words, “All cultures have underlying assumptions and it is these assumptions or folk ideas which are the building blocks of any worldview. Any one worldview will be based upon many individual folk ideas and if one is seriously interested in studying worldview, one will need first to describe some of the folk ideas that contribute to the formation of that worldview” (Dundes 96). Hence, a segment of the population might tie together diverse and demonstrably real (if exaggerated) events like cattle mutilation, child abduction, and random murder under the rubric of Satanism—a foundational, theological explanation of the evil we see in the world and the purpose behind that evil. Others might explain these same phenomena as clear evidence of an extraterrestrial presence on earth—another foundational mythology which accounts for first and last things, as Mircea Eliade might say. Whether the totalizing narrative is true is less important than whether it can theoretically account for the puzzling events for a large enough group of people and thus in some way through the agreed-upon narrative make the unknown known and less frightening. Brian Meehan concludes that, paradoxically, calling a human murderer a monster has the result of easing the fear surrounding his crimes: “The culture’s intention . . . is not to fictionalize the crime, but to lessen the threat such irrationality poses to a belief in an ordered world. In a universe of angels, devils, and human beings, all overseen by an omnipotent god, vampires are far less disturbing than a real Ted Bundy” (4). A visible, so-called “monstrous” threat, even if it doesn’t exist, can be combated and ritually purged. Along these lines, Philip Jenkins argues that as a threatening Outsider or Other, the serial killer achieves legendary, nearly mythic status by providing contemporary society with a refreshingly unambiguous villain against which nearly everyone can agree to unite (Using Murder 112). The need for immediate legends to explain the unexplainable drives people to the reassurance of bounded narrative. The seemingly timeless truths implicit in folk narrative provide imaginative relief from the stress and anxiety of local insecurity. This relief works on the individual as well as the group level, since any one hearer of a narrative can then assume the empowering function of storyteller and retell it to a guaranteed avid audience. Murder may indeed serve as a powerful literary metaphor, if we accept one working definition of literature as “difficult” or elite narrative, but it has its roots in the easily grasped texts of folklore.

Another of the main reasons the serial murderer services the folklore narrative so well is the level of fear he generates in a given community. This fear, in turn, is often used as a type of “verbal social control,” John Widdowson argues (105). Fear, as a negative emotion, has many social applications, one of which is to threaten people with death should they transgress against community standards. Thus, in many ways, the multicide who has achieved folkloric dimensions becomes an unacknowledged but nevertheless useful agent of social control, waiting in the shadows to strike down individuals who stray from the borders of accepted behavior. Widdowson makes a distinction between two kinds of “bogeymen” in folklore: “A figure which is intrinsically frightening” or “A figure which is used for frightening others” (105). This latter “threatening” figure has found its way into popular American folklore in many narrative guises. Harold Schechter and David Everitt list some of them as “The Roommate’s Death,” “The Assailant in the Back Seat,” and “The Baby-Sitter and the Man Upstairs.” Schechter and Everitt point out that popular media culture, through cinematic figures such as Michael Myers (Halloween) and films such as When a Stranger Calls, retell these well-known tales in a more technologically sophisticated form (167-8). These threatening figures tend to prey on unwary or self-absorbed teenagers, most notoriously the sexually promiscuous ones. The “slasher” films, as the Halloween-derivatives have come to be known, and their genre brethren atemporalize specific ideological concerns, such as questions of victim and agency in 1970s feminism in the case of Halloween, into a mythic landscape where all transgressions against the collective are brutally punished by a cultural avenger who is not the alien Outsider he initially appears to be. These killers are among the most conservative figures in a society, answering “liberal” deviations from the mythic norm with murder in a project to remove those transgressors from specific history and “restore” them to timeless purity.

Like any “good” monster, the serial killer as a type never really dies in the narratives of multiple murder. Certainly, an individual murderer in the typical serial-killer narrative may die, but another will invariably rise from the Gothic setting to take his place. Generally, any one killer’s “immortality” is not a physical defiance of death so much as a cultural one. The memory of his deeds haunts the community through a folktale cycle centering around threatening figures. Of course, in some plots, of which Halloween and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street are the most typical, the killer is at least implicitly coded as, if not specifically acknowledged to be, supernatural and correspondingly immortal. As Amy Taubin observes, “It is the killer’s ability to rise from the dead in film after film—rather than his appearance, his physical strength or even the extreme sadism of his actions—that demonizes him” (“Killing” 16). Taubin’s insight into genre formula brings us from the mytho-historic origins of serial murder to its incarnation within genre texts.

Serial Murder and Genre

The current popularity of serial killer fiction can be further understood through a relocation of the discussion into another area—that of genre texts. The serial killer narrative has developed its own sub-generic conventions and plot formulas, while overlapping with and borrowing from a variety of genres, such as horror and detective noir. However, the fictional serial killer’s most appropriate genre home, as Peter Hutchings argues, is horror (91). The horror genre can be best defined as that which depicts monsters for the purpose of disturbing, unsettling, and disorienting its consumers, often for the seemingly paradoxical purpose of reinforcing community identity. Martin Tropp, for example, argues that the horror story’s appeal (and its ready adaptability to film as well) can only be comprehended in terms of its audience reception. The horror story is meant to be experienced as a communal event, he insists:

Carol Clover, while noting that folklorists usually “disown” horror movies in particular as too profit-oriented and technological in construction, agrees: “. . . horror movies look like nothing so much as folktales—a set of fixed tale types that generate an endless stream of what are in effect variants” (10). James Twitchell similarly argues for an “ethnological approach,” as opposed to an auteur one, to understanding horror’s appeal: “The critic’s first job in explaining the fascination of horror is . . . to trace [horrific images’] migrations to the audience and, only then, try to understand why they have been crucial enough to pass along” (84). These critics neatly link the horror genre to the larger experience of community intersubjectivity, from which the interstitial figure of the serial killer arises, both in reality (as it is comprehended and mediated through language) and fiction.

Horror can deal with the explicitly supernatural, as seen in, for example, the “satanic” Hollywood films of the 1970s, such as The Exorcist or The Omen. However, this is an overly restrictive definition. Horror is better understood as the state of mind induced by one’s confrontation with a violation of cultural categories. Mary Douglas identifies at least three different types of violation: pollution, or “matter out of place”; moral, which “involve either the breach of important moral laws or outrages against people, or both”; and invasion of chaos, or the threat of a “lapse into incomprehensibility” (qtd. in Bridgstock 116). Pollution is integral to Noel Carroll’s definition of horror as an emotion composed of equal parts fear and nausea, elicited by the sight of the monster: “Within the context of the horror narrative, the monsters are identified as impure and unclean” (23). The serial killer as horrific monster appears human, but his “hidden” monstrosity radiates a kind of moral leprosy that taints all who come into contact with him, much like the werewolf or vampire infects others with his “disease.” The serial killer’s pollution of the moral environment marks him as a genre monster. Also in accordance with another of Douglas’s ideas, Susan Stewart identifies the chaotic, destabilizing violation of fixed boundaries, “between the human and the other, between nature and culture” (42), as central to horror’s effect. Hence, horror’s insistence on doubling “as a polysemy of the self . . . since repetition in this genre has the effect of cumulative suspense. One repetition is sufficient to imply an infinity of repetitions” (43). Philip Brophy also isolates repetition as a key element in horror: “It is a genre which mimics itself mercilessly—because its statement is coded within its very mimicry” (3). A repetitive series of grisly murders, then, is one of the most appropriate subjects for the horror genre.

Within this framework of violations, the serial killer manages to incarnate all of them in his fictional treatments. As Andrew Tudor explains, the murdering “madman” (like Norman Bates) is a relatively recent horror-genre character: “. . . horror-movie madmen are not visionary obsessives, glorying in scientific reason as they single-mindedly pursue their researches. They are, rather, victims of overpowering impulses that well up from within; monsters brought forth by the sleep of reason, not by its attractions. Horror-movie psychotics murder, terrorize, maim and rape because of some inner compulsion, because the psyche harbors the dangerous excesses of human passion” (Mad 185). This recognizably human passion, however distorted, is what is so insidious and threatening about the serial killer in particular. In spite of cultural attempts to demonize him, he resists such distancing efforts. Dana Polan contends that horror narratives “now suggest that the horror is not merely among us, but rather part of us, caused by us” (202). This tendency toward moral equivalency produces an unresolved tension in most serial murder narratives. The killer is coded as a monster, but his tragic personal history of abuse and neglect is also usually foregrounded as part of the narrative, humanizing him to at least some extent and making him capable of earning our sympathy. The overall effect of this tension is to draw our attention to the process of storytelling itself when we see how earlier genre conventions of “monsterdom” are played with and overlaid onto the recognizably human killer.

Yet the serial killer’s actions by their very nature cannot help but propel him into the mythic territory reserved for the most extreme taboo violators. His random murders pollute, in that they often involve gross injury, mutilation, and dismemberment. They morally violate society’s laws and affront personal notions of propriety and civilized conduct. They threaten intellectual chaos through sheer inaccessibility of motive. It is little wonder, then, that the real-life serial killer incurs unprecedented levels of opprobrium, and that his fictional counterpart exemplifies an aesthetic decentering of meaning common to horror narrative strategy. His serial murders imply an infinite progression and regression. His identity is not solidly cast. He will typically be at least doubled in the narrative, if not tripled or quadrupled. Even as he narcissistically seeks reflection on the outer screen represented by his victims, he reflects back all attempts to read him.

In another context, Jacques Derrida explains the importance of doubling to perception: “For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. . . . What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three” (36). Similarly, Michel Foucault points to the Other as a metaphor for what he calls the “unthought,” or unconscious mind:

Given Foucault’s basic assertion that the modern consciousness is given shape by a dialectical tension between the rational and non-rational mind, the funhouse-reflective serial murderer is a fitting metaphor for the modern man philosophically in extremis. The modernist serial killer, absorbed into his unthought self, commits to a dualist project that is at once systematic and messy. He perpetrates a violent penetration of boundaries that upsets epistemological, ontological, and teleological conceptions. Literary and cinematic conventions are distorted but not abandoned to more realistically depict his “madness.” The result is fictional narrative that seems at once fractured and seamless in its pursuit of more spectacle. As W.H. Rockett concludes in his study of horrific film narrative: “Thanks to [those filmmakers] who have returned to the Lovecraft notion of the universe turned upside down and improved upon it to turn the upside down universe sideways through convention twisting and the abandonment of strict Aristotelean narrative conventions, today’s audience enters a theater knowing anything can happen” (135).

The horror story where “anything can happen” exists within a larger generic territory comprised of what Linda Williams calls “body genres.” The body genre is characterized by its depiction of “the spectacle of a body caught in the grip of intense sensation or emotion” and also “the focus on what could probably best be called a form of ecstacy . . . a quality of uncontrollable convulsion or spasm” (“Film Bodies” 4). The very excess of the images seeks to replicate itself in the reactive, sympathetic body of the spectator. The genre’s grossly immediate effects tend to associate it with “low” or “easy” cultural forms—much like the serial format. The body genre can run the gamut from “splatter” like H.G. Lewis’s Blood Feast to what Williams calls “weepie” women’s melodrama. Manohla Dargis identifies a certain type of body genre narrative as “pulp,” ranging from the early twentieth century cheap magazines that published multi-generic stories of horror, adventure, and detection; to early noir detective and “roughneck” films of the 1930s and ‘40s; to the A-List outlaw and gangster movies of the 1970s; to the 1990s “Tarantino school” self-referential updates of genre favorites (6-9). Most relevant to this discussion are pulp novels such as Jim Thompson’s The Killer Inside Me, which Mark Seltzer examines in great detail as a prototypical serial killer narrative in his own book. The noir characteristics of pulp can be seen in the tone of paranoia and themes of compromised morality and anti-authoritarianism—what Lee Horsley deems the Dashiell Hammett influence evident, for example, in the contemporary “pulp” mysteries of James Ellroy (142-3). The links between the general category of pulp/body fiction and the serial killer text, as elucidated by Robert Conrath (“Serial Heroes” 154-55), establish the beginnings of a critical reckoning with the latter. Like horror, noir, pulp, and other such “body genres,” the serial killer subgenre is part of a cultural return to the immediacy of a raw sensuality both absolute and dark. These texts dramatize the fears and lusts of the flesh in a modern world undergoing an intellectual crisis of representation.

The Serial Killer Subgenre and Its Conventions

The serial killer story, as a subgeneric movement within the totality of body genres, has evolved its own fairly rigid set of rules that audiences are quite conscious of—a system of narrative obligations and expectations given satirical treatment in Wes Craven’s Scream movies. But the fictional serial killer, with his “motiveless,” idiosyncratic modus operandi, is only the latest manifestation of the homicidal maniacs that have proliferated in American literature and visual media such as cinema and television. The serial killer subgenre, most strictly speaking, dates from the late 1970s or early 1980s with the coinage and widespread dissemination of the term “serial murder,” and so that is where I will concentrate my analysis of selected works of serial killer fiction. In these works, the serial killer is at once transcendental and reductive, literally programmed to commit murder according to some hermetically structured pattern or design, but a pattern that in and of itself magically contains some manifest, non-rational appeal. In praxis, the serial murders are indicative of a sort of atavistic modernism—a totalizing project that works backward to primitivism. The serial killer through the heinousness of his acts defies ready understanding and to observers confirms the darkest fears about human nature. This makes him as a worst-case-scenario character pliable to any number of authorial ideological agendas from both the left and the right ends of the political spectrum. But it is generally safe to conclude that the serial killer in fiction is a kind of debased and traumatized visionary, whose murders privately re-empower him with a pseudo-divine aura. In many of these treatments, the extremely physical method by which the serial killer seeks to achieve a personal apotheosis subtextually implies that individual human nature is somehow bifurcated into a rational self in opposition to an un-rational or Jungian Shadow self. Within this context, the Shadow is the stronger, more compelling, and more corrupting and dangerous of the two. Human nature as foundationally flawed or erring requires an internal censor, which during the dialectic is in constant danger of metaphysical co-option by the desire and sin of the unthought self, or lacking that censor, some form of external governor or constraint. In most works in this subgenre, then, there is a melancholy sense that mankind, since it is always susceptible to committing evil of this magnitude, is ultimately doomed.

In spite of the fairly recent coinage of the term “serial killer,” the subgenre is a hybrid with a long pedigree. It is a dark patchwork of earlier genre depictions of multiple murderers and folkloric threatening figures. This confluence of genre elements has been reworked over the years into the contemporary moment and packaged for mass reconsumption in pseudo-demonic forms simultaneously derivative of popular conceptualizations and folk legends of vampires and werewolves but subtly reflective of the peculiar cultural anxieties of America in the late twentieth century. The elegant, aristocratic vampire as a product of nineteenth and early twentieth century literature, for example, transmogrifies quite easily into the contemporary serial killer beloved of journalistic tabloids, hit movies, and best-selling novels. He is a neo-Gothic villain and/or demon lover. That the contemporary serial killer inhabits Gothic territory so easily is no accident. The cultural representation of multiple murder, whether presented as fact or fiction, changes its guises from generation to generation but is not new to our recent history, as Philip Jenkins observes (“Historical” 377-92). The current popularity of serial killer narratives can be explained as the latest twentieth-century redressing of the ongoing human fascination with tales of gruesome murders and evil villains finding a receptive audience in a nation galvanized by an escalating dialectic between the Manichean philosophies of both the New Right and the anti-New Right.

The “serial killer” as labeled by the FBI during the American 1980s and passed into the mass-media instruments of popular culture, ever quick to cater to the prevailing ideological winds, is a fantastic confabulation of Gothic/Romantic villain, literary vampire and werewolf, detective and “pulp” fiction conceits, film noir outsider, frontier outlaw, folkloric threatening figure, and nineteenth century pseudo-sociological conceptions of criminal types given contemporary plausibility. All of these are mytho-apocalyptic guises of the murdering Other, whose seemingly random but idiosyncratically meaningful, ritualistic invasions of bodies serve as metaphors for and invocations of the generalized, boundary-leveling violence of catastrophic apocalypse itself. The serial killer is a literalization of the devoured/devouring world motif in carnivalesque folk culture. In such a culture, as Mikhail Bakhtin observes, the limits between human flesh and the rest of the world are blurred or erased altogether (317). As an updated version of the murdering bogeyman, the serial killer lurks in the shadows of communal existence, taking down those who stray from the herd. The folk demonology represented in the narrative exploits of shape-shifters and blood-drinking monsters such as vampires, werewolves, and now serial killers dramatizes those rare but horrible occasions when humans for private reasons have appropriated the state’s traditional power to murder humans en masse.

The mass-media purveyors of the serial killer legends in contemporary America respond quickly to their perceptions of the public’s interests, fears, and concerns exactly because their economic survival is chained so thoroughly to the need to retain an audience which demands an extraordinary mix of the culturally forbidden and the socially conservative—much like the courtly audience for the French fairy tales of the seventeenth century (Zipes 11). Media instruments react to any dramatic social phenomenon in a rumor cycle of ever-inflating narrative claims very recognizable to the folklorist. The net result is the creation of an over-arching contemporary mythology where aliens abduct women from their homes in the dead of night and invade their wombs to create human/alien hybrids, where rural Satanic cults ritually sacrifice babies and children and eat their hearts, and where serial killers mutilate and devour the lost and unwary travelers in the American mythscape. The killer alien and the serial killer are elements or fragments being coordinated in some as yet unclear but emerging mythology. But one of the mythology’s clearest principles is that the malevolent lurks in the everyday. Our technological, brightly lit America may resemble a postmodern interactive sound stage. But in the contemporary mythology, many of the seemingly ordinary, even boring, actors upon its stage retire behind drawn curtains to be abducted by aliens, on the passive level. On the more active level, the actors sexually violate and/or beat their loved ones, stoke masturbatory fantasies with child porn and snuff photos clandestinely purchased from Other countries through the Internet when not feverishly seeking underaged sex partners online, worship Satan while listening to Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, and kill strangers in order to keep their heads in the freezer and their sex organs in a pot on the stove. Such are the radically paranoid elements of the mythological worldview that takes a fearful America into the new millennium.

Given this paranoid mythology, I wish to analyze in the pages ahead one of its recurrent themes—multiple murder—as it specifically functions in numerous formative, influential serial killer narratives of the American 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s. The serial killer’s recent popularity as monster in this country is an uneasy expression of a superficially apolitical craving for the simple reassurance of seamless and universal myths to mitigate the endless paradoxes and struggles of the present moment. The serial killer of recent American fiction is embarked upon a quest not of self-discovery but of self-recovery—recovery of a lost metaphysical certitude. In this sense, he is a modernist, but where he departs from modernism is his extreme skepticism of logos, or the yoking of word to meaning. For the more intellectual serial killers of fiction, language is an ironic game or joke to be played with and upon exasperated opponents who from their rationalist, modernist perspectives still believe in meaning as negotiated by language. For the more brutish serial killers, language is to be avoided as much as possible, if not altogether. For both types, only actions—the immediately sensual—carry an urgency or warrant of meaning in the glossy artificiality of the contemporary world.

None of this is to suggest that the serial killer stories haunting our postmodern media are nihilistic or apolitical. In fiction, the contemporary American serial killer often still works within the American cultural grand-narrative of “frontier individualism.” He is actually what some might call an affirmative postmodernist. He is one who has accepted a political agenda—popularized during the middle of the twentieth century but partially anticipated in many earlier literary and philosophical formulations—of challenging all epistemological limits, including the “sacred cows” of liberal humanism. But neither has he necessarily deposed or destroyed them as a true avant garde modernist might. This affirmative postmodernism as practiced by the serial killer is broad enough to incorporate both liberal and conservative political agendas. However, if one accepts that neoconservatism is the primary American political mood of the 1980s and 1990s, it follows that for the moment, anyway, American individualism will display a distinctly rightist bent. But whether coming from the left or right, postmodernity as a cultural force evokes a crisis-as-spectacle atmosphere (Olsen 13) in which literal violence as well as increasingly sensational narrative representations of it can easily flourish, simply because the postmodern transgression of all boundary is inherently a “violent” act of cognition. Thus, the proliferation of serial-murder narratives over the past decade and a half should be perceived as one specialized branching, and not a terribly novel one, of a more generalized movement toward violent spectacle in the arts. It follows, then, that the spectacular criminal, such as the serial killer, will achieve “A List” status in popular entertainment.

The contemporary serial killer in fiction resonates deeply with the American public because he so literally expresses what many people feel—an extreme frustration with not only the dehumanizing complexities of mass democracy (Conrath, “Serial Heroes” 151) but the representational ambiguities of the postmodern world. As what Michel Foucault calls an “empirico-transcendental doublet” (319), the serial killer is pathologized by an inability to balance experience and aesthetics, finding purity in neither and so seeking to recover both. The serial killer seeks transcendental meaning in the traditional manner of idealistic truth seekers but is thwarted by the indeterminacy of experience. His frustrated aesthetic eschews or mocks arid intellectualism and turns increasingly toward the primal, often violent and grossly sensual immediacy of pre-thought or non-rational mythic patterns, including ritualized multiple murder, but in such a clinical and detached fashion that one still sees the modernist inside the Beast. The serial killer’s murder trajectory aspires toward sociological liberation and higher meaning, even as it drops him to the nadir of human behavior. His is a vertiginous project, leading its author into a reductive pattern of compulsive killing that attempts to correspond to an ideal held in the killer’s expansive fantasies. It might even be said that he is an example of Kenneth Burke’s definition of the pious criminal: “If a man who is a criminal lets the criminal trait in him serve as the informing aspect of his character . . . the criminal deterioration which the moralist with another point of view might discover in him is the very opposite of deterioration as regards the test of piety” (77). The Romantic linkage of art and divinity to criminality—even murder as Cameron and Fraser have pointed out in de Sade and Genet’s works—serves as prerequisite for contemporary narrative obsession with serial murder, which substitutes repetition for creativity, pattern for design, and the spilled blood of corpses for paints.

In addition to a focus on the complexities of artistic representation, it can also be said that serial killer fictions enact an open-ended dialectic between the need to conform to the social system and the secret desire to flout its rules with impunity. The fictional serial killer, who out of necessity conceals his murderous identity from those who would stop him, exhibits “absolute conformism to the system without believing in the system” (Seltzer 163). In one key aspect, however, he does exemplify an historic American “virtue”—the reliance on violence as a means of self-expression. The serial killer, deviant extraordinaire, is no deviant at all in his American desire to exempt himself from the societal restrictions against murder in order to fulfill a higher, consecrated purpose with which many of his countrymen would find sympathy, if not approval.

American serial killer fiction, while primarily concentrating on its pessimism about unrestrained human nature, addresses history and social problems, but not in any complex way. Rather, the effort is made to provide one or two easily identified scapegoats as root causes of the violence, or to give contemporary fears of Others a narrative structure for the purpose of making them somewhat manageable, if only by proxy. Other violent media or child abuse often appear as the “culprit” in the subgenre—in much the same way that atomic testing during 1950s “dinosaur/giant insect/mutated human-on-the-loose” films is dangled before the audience as just enough explanation to make the outlandish scenarios plausible. Paradoxically, the violent stories provoke and reassure American middle-class audiences by confirming their commonly held even if rarely publicly vocalized paranoias about class and lifestyle—that yes, their fears of homosexuals and single career women over 30 and male strangers from both the elitist upper classes and the grubby lower classes are quite justified. Viewed from this perspective, the narratives mostly serve, intentionally or otherwise, to uphold the patriarchal, law-and-order status quo. They also divert narrative attention away from harmful economic and social policies, which do far more violence against persons than the relatively rare phenomenon of serial murder committed by isolated individuals. The serial killer story, in spite of its focus on a malignant social reality, offers little to nothing in the way of genuine social reform. Such a story typically reduces complex issues of modern communal existence into individual Gothic melodrama relayed in a reassuringly traditional, linear narrative form.

However, one must be careful to avoid monolithic and ultimately reductive interpretations of any text, let alone a large grouping of them centered around so polysemous a figure as the serial killer. Because one of postmodernism’s key conceits is that it is impossible to suppress completely a text’s own internal resistance to a unified authorial voice, very real possibilities of subversion and/or reform of established order do co-exist, side by side, with the countersubversive voice of American serial killer fiction. Maybe the inherent structural complexities of a narrative that casts an inscrutable multiple murderer as a central character saves some of these texts from being polemical rants against a naked singularity. The manner in which these fictional characters are constructed often subverts vested ideological interests and indeed all such boundaries, in a manner typical to contemporary, Gothic-derived horror texts (Modleski 162). Ideological partisanship or advocacy may be obvious at various points in the narrative, but the tone will rarely hold throughout the text before another equally compelling opposition or possibility arises. There is little doubt this internal ideological self-destabilization stems from the serial killer subgenre’s enormous debt to Gothic fiction, which David Punter identifies as a “dialectic of comfort and disturbance . . . a continuous oscillation between reassurance and threat” (423).

The reason that the serial killer text usually frustrates any kind of unified, modernist-type ideological analysis lies in its Romantic (more accurately, Gothic) legacy of transgression of all boundaries as a conscious narrative agenda. Violation itself becomes the purpose and the meaning of the text, rather than a conscious privileging of one distinct ideological system over another. Perhaps the safest ideological conclusion to draw from these narratives is that they are relentlessly pessimistic about man’s nature, which is seen as polarized into saint and sinner, the two locked in perpetual private struggle for control of the body. The serial killer as metaphor collapses boundaries between good and evil, left and right, male and female, high art and kitsch. What is revealed standing in the ruins is not the Noble Savage but the Beastly Cannibal. His behavior is almost always constructed as an acting-out of what everyone else in the narrative feels an urge to do in the first place but is prohibited from only by custom and practice, which illustrates the Gothic’s deeply pessimistic underbelly. Admittedly, the serial killer through extreme and arguably evil acts lends himself to extreme interpretations, but one must be very cautious in conclusions so drawn. In serial killer fiction, in spite of its deceptively traditional narrative structure, individual identities reveal their fragile constitutions. Selves blur, conflate, and shift with aggravating fluidity. This indeterminacy of self in relation to Other and environment is a standard of earlier Gothic fiction, as I will argue in the chapters to come.

Before this discussion can go much further, it is first necessary to separate the fictional serial killers from the actual ones studied and/or sensationalized by criminologists and journalists alike. In spite of the de-stability of rigidly defined fact and fiction in discussions of serial murder, the conventions that shape the serial killer in contemporary American fictional media must be as sharply distinguished as possible from sociological or journalistic definitions of serial murder, however much fiction writers base their murderous creations on the reports of those who chronicle serial-murder case studies. The fictional serial killer bears little relation to his real-life counterparts, such as the psychosexually disturbed Ted Bundy or Ed Gein. In fiction, the serial killer is often more exotic in terms of methodology and pathology, since authors seldom resist the temptation to sensationalize him in some uniquely identifiable way, no matter how restrained the narrative treatment overall. He is a violent but less impassioned example of what John Fraser has defined as the violator figure in literature, a man who is so obsessed that he literally loses his self-consciousness in “an intensity of passion” not unrelated to ancient definitions of demonic possession (20-1). However, the fictional serial killer’s form of visionary possession expresses itself not so much in a frothing “madman’s” rage, but rather in chilling abstraction and a deliberate, almost mechanical precision well in keeping with the industrial age, as Mark Seltzer argues in Wound Culture. Consequently, the serial killer’s “signature” crimes tend to be sensational but rigidly unvarying in practice—mechanical and repetitive. In some treatments of the subject, the serial killer is almost literally a monochromatic automaton, mindlessly acting out again and again primal traumas and unvarying in his “signature.” He exemplifies what Herbert Blau says of repetition: that it is a metaphoric “pregnancy without birth, and thus the end of reproduction, the structure of repetition which is the economy of death” (70). As Blau elucidates, repetition encapsulates a kind of death in life, or a cyclically regressive motion without hope of saving tangents or new influences.6

Even given the mechanical nature of his actions, the fictional serial killer’s motives are usually more metaphysically, psychologically, and culturally grandiose or, inversely, completely nihilistic, than those of his real-life counterparts. He is authorially invested with layers of meaning and metaphor, all of which are destabilized in the course of the narrative. His character is an elaborate construct designed exclusively to test—in many cases without providing firm answers and in others ludicrously partisan ones—philosophical maxims (free will versus determinism), psychological systems (usually psychoanalytic), socioeconomic models (capitalism in particular), and, of course, the binary nature of good and evil itself. His inscrutability will invite multiple readings from other characters within the narrative (and from those reading it), who will invariably project their deepest fears and longings onto the blank screen he represents. He is broadly allegorical in the sense that Frederic Jameson defines allegory:

On the global scale, allegory allows the most random, minute, or isolated landscapes to function as a figurative machinery in which questions about the system and its control over the local ceaselessly rise and fall, with a fluidity that has no equivalent . . . a host of partial subjects, fragmentary or schizoid constellations, can often now stand in allegorically for trends and forces in the world system, in a transitional situation in which genuinely transnational classes, such as a new international proletariat and a new density of global management, have not yet anywhere clearly emerged. (Geopolitical 5)

In light of Jameson’s general definition, B. Ruby Rich’s thesis concerning the recent popularity of the serial killer subgenre carries added weight. She argues that serial murderers, at least in their late 1980s and early 1990s incarnations when they gained their current cultural appeal, allegorically represent the domestic tensions inherent in a world that has lost its master narrative of the Cold War (6). These domestic tensions include, but are not limited to, the fear of strangers in a mobile society, the fear of the upper and lower classes, the fear of sexual relationships, and the fear of international capitalist corporations and ruthless management. The serial killer’s status as all-purpose cultural bogeyman guarantees a ready audience to any storyteller, no matter how skilled or unskilled, and ensures that the commodification will continue indefinitely. The serial killer’s commodification possibilities are virtually limitless because as literary figure he is easily adaptable to modern print or visual media. In fact, Richard Dyer argues that capitalistic media itself is based on what he calls seriality: “. . . the mix of repetition and anticipation, and indeed of the anticipation of repetition . . . However, it is only under capitalism that seriality became a reigning principle of cultural production, starting with the serialisation of novels and cartoons, then spreading to news and movie programming. Its value as a selling device for papers and broadcasts is obvious” (14). Dyer then makes the case that the serial killer is a natural character type for a modern media based on the pleasure of seriality.

As a fictional character in modern media, the serial killer displays several faces, many within the same narrative. He can be an outlaw artist, a visionary, a hyper-intelligent gameplayer, a masculine hero, or a demonic punisher. Most striking to the observer of the subgenre is its near-obsessive linkage of serial murder to art, even in the deliberately clinical prose of the social-science and law-enforcement journals. The literary connection between the murderous impulse and the creative urge dates back to at least the Romantic era. Crime itself, as the term and its connotations of individual transgression against the bourgeois social contract are commonly understood, is a relatively modern phenomenon. It coincides with the late eighteenth century advent of literary romanticism as part of a general cultural trend to privilege the metaphysical individual sensibility over what Joel Black calls “conventional morality as encoded in human law” (30). Thus, the law-breaking criminal and the tradition-shattering artist forge an individual “vision,” as both rebel against the strictures of inherited middle-class ethics and values. As marginal figures, the artist and criminal share a real kinship. Black observes that murder “fascinated the romantic sensibility” (56). Murder fascinates the Gothic and post-romantic sensibility as well. The proliferation of texts, both factual and fictional, that combine the sensationalism of serial murder with an often-ill fitting overlay of classical references are an inevitable consequence of a metadiscursive culture where the modernist concept of “high art” has ironically combined with the boundary-piercing, rebellious agenda of individual romanticism to create mass-market variations on Thomas De Quincey’s now-notorious ideas of “murder as fine art.” Thus, it is not surprising that most of our fictional serial killers are artist manques. They strive to impose a private and Romantic vision of self upon the flow of consensual reality in the time-honored fashion of unappreciated, isolated artists everywhere.

Another common face of the fictional serial killer is that of the game-player of superior, perhaps even genius, intellect. The cultural construction of serial murder, fact or fiction, often emphasizes the intellectual abilities of the killer, positing him as brighter or more cleverly manipulative than the average American. As a trickster, he often displays a macabre sense of humor, both in his words or actions.9 As a dramatic device, his intelligence allows him to engage in protracted and highly intricate cat-and-mouse games, involving layer upon layer of ruse, deception, red herrings, and encryption with victims and law enforcement alike. Such valorization of the serial killer’s supposed genius serves two agendas, as Richard Tithecott argues: “estrangement and celebration” (146). The killer is estranged in the sense that the serial killer is again superficially rendered an Other apart from standards of normality, in this case relating to intelligence. But he is also celebrated, in the sense that rationality as virtue exists within the serial killer as well, and this makes him recognizably human even if we are incapable of understanding his motives. Tithecott is quick to point out, however, that the rationality and supposed high intelligence of the serial killer makes him sane and therefore capable of being incarcerated as an “evil” transgressor in accordance with countersubversive ideological principles.

A third face of the serial killer is the masculine hero, or what Tithecott calls “the warrior knight” (150). Some critics of the subgenre, such as Caputi and Cameron and Fraser, argue that the serial killer is a logical embodiment of masculine values of conquest and rapine, both explicitly expressed and implicitly encoded, within a patriarchal culture built upon a foundation of “chivalry.” The chivalric knight, at least as the popular culture has defined him, illustrates the self-delusional nature of the conquering/seducing hero. He fancies himself to be a gallant and courteous protector of the weak and courtier of damsels, but in actuality is a paternalist at best and a murdering rapist at worst. For example, the quiet and polite “boy next door” who savagely kills is a stock genre character, from Norman Bates through Hannibal Lecter. The serial killer’s surface chivalry toward women (to the stunningly literal tendency in these narratives for murdering men to don the garb and sometimes even the skins of the women they idealize) masks a deep-seated (perhaps unconscious, perhaps not) male desire to torment and victimize them.

The fictional serial killer also often appears to be a visionary preparing for his own unique form of mystic transport through an amalgamation of Christian ritual and/or primitivist magic based on blood sacrifice. He attempts to erase the difference between his temporal self and eternity by restoring the ancient practice of ritual sacrifice to his culture’s bloodless mouthing of spiritual doctrine—doctrine originally based in what Rene Girard in another context calls the collective rituals of institutionalized murder designed for the purpose of preventing individual murder (102). Where the serial killer becomes an enemy of society, then, is not necessarily in his desire to murder, which his civilization will thoughtfully redirect into socially acceptable manifestations, but rather in his willingness to eschew the approved social channels and instead sacrifice victims of his own choosing. Even then, however, the serial killer is imitating the qualities of individual initiative and resourcefulness—qualities highly valued in American society—so he is never as Other as might be supposed at first glance. Indeed, the fact that in most narratives he attracts so many zombie-like disciples, or at least compels thoughtful observers to acknowledge their own murderous impulses, only reinforces the notion that the serial killer literalizes spiritual and nationalistic ideals that most of his fellow Americans share.

A fifth face of the serial killer is that of the demonic messenger and/or punisher, both of transgressive individuals and civilizations. This guise is potentially the most conservative or socially minded in its intolerance of deviance from traditional norms and values. It is the most nihilistic or skeptical in its destruction of all communal possibilities. And it is the most personally reaffirming in its merging of the individual with the Godhead—the Master of all master narratives. The demonic serial killer is a “monster” in the most ancient meaning of the word—as omen of divine favor or disfavor. Many of these narratives establish that the serial killer appears as a nightmarishly literal manifestation of the “normal” protagonist’s deepest fears and/or taboo desires—a “natural” outgrowth of sin. Through intense conflict with this id made flesh, the protagonist either triumphs over his base urges or succumbs to them, but in any eventuality is severely traumatized for having harbored or in some cases acted on such desires in the first place. The serial killer’s function in such a narrative, then, is to serve an agent of divine justice sent to punish the protagonist’s Original Sin, whatever it may be in the context of the narrative. Such a narrative implies, of course, that destiny or determinism—some outer Nature—solely rules human action, and that reactive, not proactive, solutions are the only possible strategies to resolve this crisis of self-hood. On a larger narrative plane, the serial killer may also have been “sent” (or believe that he has been sent, which amounts to the same thing) to destroy—not punish, which implies a future—a society for its evils. In such a text, the demonic serial killer functions as an agent of a catastrophic form of apocalypse that has lost much of its millennial optimism and instead is characterized by despair, not necessarily for the individual but for the society. Since the threat of widespread and nihilistic devastation looms in the near distance, destruction is the primary result of the apocalypse, not rebirth in any redemptive sense. Social reform, then, is impossible. The civilization is destined to die. This argument toward futility on the part of a frustrated reactionary signals the textual presence of perhaps the most skeptical form of contemporary American sensibilities.

These five faces of the serial killer provide a reasonably comprehensive and workable overview of character prototypes within the subgenre. It is next useful to “profile” the various structuring principles common to specific narratives in the subgenre. Serial killer fiction, as a composite of many genres, finds itself interweaving at least four general structural or thematic patterns: the neo-Gothic, the detective procedural, the “psycho” profile, and the mytho-apocalyptic. Any given narrative may be structured by predominantly one movement or another, but many will employ some proportions of all four in a quadrilateral structuring mechanism.

The first movement, the neo-Gothic, clearly reflects the subgenre’s origins in the Dark Romantic, horror, and melodrama conventions of the nineteenth century by emphasizing the relationship between killer and victim as a type of dangerous seduction taking place in a haunted landscape of taboo violations and border transgressions. The second movement, the detective procedural, focuses heavily on the killer but gives at least equal time to those “detectives,” amateur or professional, who have taken it upon themselves to stop him. The third movement, the psycho profile, may adopt any tone or stance toward its subject, but generally speaking, it centers upon the killer as protagonist, either placing the audience directly into the murderous point of view or somewhere close by, through friends, lovers, acquaintances, and/or victims. The mytho-apocalyptic movement re-contextualizes or de-contextualizes the serial killer from his historical moment in an attempt to give him a kind of apotheosis as a demonic messenger whose actions directly or indirectly bring down the “cleansing” fire of apocalypse upon a failed world. In the chapters ahead, I will respectively discuss and illustrate each of these movements.

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