I don’t Believe Serial Killers
When I say that I mean that I don’t really understand why people do evil things in literature or in the real world but evil senseless acts happen all the time. Fortunately (and unfortunately), I haven’t met any Iago type villains in the real world. I certainly haven’t met anyone who I know is a serial killer, though I have my doubts about a few people. I’ve met plenty of people I don’t like, and people who are lazy, and people who are selfish, and people who are afraid so as a result they do things that I think are bad. Most of the people I know who do selfish acts that look evil to me have been extremely hurt. But, then again, everyone has been hurt in some horrible way because its not a matter of if bad things happening but when and where it will happen.
So that being said what is it about these pains and hurts that makes one person turn serial killer, versus a comedian, versus a saint or even a writer? The simple answer is to look at life experiences that give people the coping skills or lack of coping skills and then justify that with their motivations and emotions. When I say it out-loud this sounds almost formulaic but I find myself almost never “buying” the conflicts in writing. It usually seems phoned in and convenient.
I did read Junot Diaz’s Drown again this week and he is the master of complications and evil acts. He can boil down a conflict and make it, all at once, be rooted in the global community, the local community, a family, cultural expectation and in the realm of the individual character. Granted Diaz is playing on some easily identifiable tropes (especially the machismo and the American immigrant experience) and I feel like a good chunk of his characters come from his real life. So if we are fortunate to come from a world where these problems aren’t a problem for us how do we do it too?
I’m slightly fascinated by serial killers, at least through the genre fiction that deals with them. For those characters the killing often seems to have to do with outsmarting the sleuth, kind of like a chess game.
Carly, your post reminds me of this past weeks Science Friday episode. Ira Flatow interviewed Deborah Blum who just wrote a book about poisons and the history of forensic science, it’s really fascinating stuff. Anyway, she said that a lot of people who kill by poison don’t get caught, until they do a second or third time. Check out the interview at: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201004022