Serial Killer Novels
If you like Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris, try these other recommended novels with serial killer characters for your book club or book report
Hannibal Rising is the latest Thomas Harris novel about the psychopath psychiatrist Dr. Hannibal Lecter. If you like your characters well-done, try Dexter or Patrick.
Dr. Hannibal Lecter is the prototype sympathetic serial killer. He’s fascinating, even if we don’t (hopefully, for us sane folks) aspire to be like him. One of the reasons for our fascination with him is that he’s the best at what he does. Characters that are interesting to us are often the pinnacle of their success.
So Lecter is interesting, and interesting spawns spin-offs.
Our first psychopathic serial killer is Dexter Morgan, of the highly alliterative novels Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Dearly Devoted Dexter, and Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay The title character and sociopath Dexter Morgan is an accomplished forensic lab technician with the Miami Dade Police Department and has an unholy interest in blood splatter. Like Hannibal, he’s unfailingly polite and cultured. He's also a sociopathic serial killer whose "Dark Passenger" drives him to commit the occasional dismemberment.
And Dexter's the good guy. The rest of them are worse.
I admit, I have reservations about glorifying serial killers. Serial killers are psychopaths who like to kill people because they view other people as worthless objects. Most serial killers (and pedophiles, for that matter) have “cognitive distortions,” which means that they don’t think straight. While the characterization of the impulse to kill as the “Dark Passanger” is interesting and not without precedent in the literature relating to real serial killers, I think that these books do create an impossible character: a psychopath who struggles to not be a psychopath or at least control his psychopathy. If a person is indeed a true psychopath, he likes it. He doesn’t want to change. He doesn’t want to control his homicidal urges. He just wants to get away with it. In this, I think the books fail.
The Dexter books are, however, uncommonly good reads. The plotlines are perfectly pitched. The characters are balanced off each other very well. They’re all internally consistent. They’re enjoyable books to read.
Our second psychopathic serial killer, Patrick Bateman in American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis, is a psychopathic serial killer living in 1980s New York City. The book opens with an absolutely fabulous first page: Patrick riding in a cab with a friend, listening to his shallow friend, and noticing the scenery in NYC, including a quote from Dante's Inferno spray-painted on a wall. It's one of the best first pages I've ever read, and I've read a lot of novels. It perfectly painted the scene and dropped us into the head of the character. I could have forgiven a lot after that first page, but I didn't need to.
Patrick Bateman is a psychopath and a high-functioning paranoid schizophrenic. Less than half of serial killers who are caught are later diagnosed with (or, perhaps, falsely display) schizophrenia. (That was a statistical note. I think the book is better for Patrick's schizo disorder.) Ellis paints a perfect portrait of a psychopath: paint-deep. That's all the deeper that psychopaths are. Inside, they're just an imperturbable deep blue hole of sterile water. There's nothing alive in there. Ellis uses materialism and fashion-consciousness as Patrick's cover for his deep hole of nothingness. The ephemera of brand names and fashion clothes and shoes and jewelry and fashionable restaurants and fashionable foodstuffs (endive!) and quippy comebacks and one-up-man's-ship concerning hipness and coolness were exhausting, which were exactly how they were meant to be. The sadistic violence, at first, was almost a respite from the banality of Patrick's life, until it, too, became repetitive and boring, which is exactly how Patrick sees it. That's the brilliance of this book. It's a deep, deep portrait of what it's like to feel nothing. Ellis is Jane Austen, delving into the lack of soul.
The note that I found absolutely rang true was when Ellis's POV character, Patrick, has a rare event: an adrenaline rush. Recent research into psychopathic personalities indicates that they have very low arousal levels. Nothing scares them. That's the problem. The fact that Patrick has it when he's trying to get reservations as a trendy restaurant highlights Patrick's inane, shallow character.
