Complicating the serial killer novel: the bystander narrator as genre disrupter

ABSTRACT

The serial killer novel has enjoyed unabated popularity since Thomas Harris’s 1988 bestseller The Silence of the Lambs prompted a publishing boom in the genre that endures today. Harris, as well as the influx of novelists who have followed in his wake, have been criticised for their gratuitous sensationalism, and for the rigid conservatism of their narrative arcs, which feature a return to order after the anarchism and disorder of the serial killer – narratives which bear little resemblance to the reality of the abject violence of serial homicide and its traumatic aftermath. This article examines the case studies of Ali Land’s novel Good Me Bad Me, and Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident, and identifies the way in which both writers innovate within the genre by using the bystander narrator to subvert the tropes of the detective procedural and decentre the generic focus on the monstrous figure of the serial killer, focussing the novel instead on the aftermath of the crime and its victims. The article argues such interventions by contemporary novelists in the serial killer genre offer a profound innovation that complicates the familiar narrative arc of anarchic crime and resolution in favour of a more ambiguous and realistic view of serial crime.

KEYWORDS:

• Crime
• serial homicide
• trauma
• genre
• bystander narrator

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Emily O’Grady is a doctoral student working in the Creative Lab at the Queensland University of Technology. Her first novel, The Yellow House, won the 2018 Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous publications such as Meanjin, Southerly and The Big Issue, and she has been shortlisted for several major prizes.

Sarah Holland-Batt is an academic working in the Creative Lab at the Queensland University of Technology. Her most recent book of poems, The Hazards (UQP), won the 2016 Australian Prime Minister's Literary Award for Poetry. She is the recipient of a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, among other honours. She is Editor of The Best Australian Poems 2017 and 2016, and the poetry editor of Island.

ORCID

Sarah Holland-Batt http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6471-7738

Notes

1. In Monsters Inc: Serial Killers and Consumer Culture, Jarvis examines American Psycho – among other serial killer novels and films – and how it ‘uncover[s] unexpected intimacies between monstrous violence and the normal desires that circulate within consumer society’ (2007, 328). In a Paris Review interview, Ellis writes:

American Psycho is … about lifestyle being sold as life, a lifestyle that never seemed to include passion, creativity, curiosity, romance, pain. Everything meaningful wiped away in favor of surfaces, in favor of looking good, having money, having six-pack abs, dating the hottest porn star, going to the hottest clubs … No one can really live up to these ideals, so there’s an immense amount of dissatisfaction roiling through the collective male psyche. Patrick Bateman is the extreme embodiment of that dissatisfaction. Nothing fulfills him. The more he acquires, the emptier he feels. (Ellis, n.d.)