15 Serial Killers
by Harold Jaffe
Raw Dog Screaming Press

"I want to hear about it, everything, all the gooshy stuff." – "Apt Pupil" by Stephen King.

There’s a part in all of us that hankers for the gooshy. We want to hunker down by the roadside and take a long hard look at the car wreck. There’s a part that yearns to gawk at the house fire and the divorce. A part of us, that as Jack Ketchum once put it, "Doesn’t look away."

In 15 Serial Killers, Harold Jaffe panders to that voyeuristic need that’s been with us since Nero tossed the first Christian into the Coliseum. He takes a microscope and a literary microphone to the lives of Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, and Henry Kissinger, (yup, I said Kissinger). He dissects their lives with the zealous unswerving bunny-in-the-headlights-look-at-that-roadkill stare of the unabashed documentarian.

In snapshot succession we are treated to fifteen scalpel slices of what it’s like to climb inside the skull space of an Aileen Wournos, a Charlie Starkweather, or a night stalking Richard Ramirez. Jaffe gets close up and personal, like a twisted Barbara Walters, fingering the viscera, sniffing the blood spoor, sitting down and sharing a cold draft beer with a cold hearted killer.

Jaffe takes an unflinching peer into what makes these cultural monsters tick. We meet the Son of Sam, the Unabomber, Dr. Kevorkian and others; stepping firmly into their psyche through the use of letters, monologues, interviews and freestyle metafictional rants. The reader is left with the feeling that Jaffe is taking part in some sort of a massacring performance art piece, a psychic network channeling act, eerily giving voice to the boogeymen and women who haunt our headlines.

This tight little collection appealed to me on a couple of different levels. As fiction it was fascinating. Lurid, relentless, dark, clinical, and sometimes outright funny. Sick and twisted and obsessively brilliant.

As nonfiction, 15 Serial Killers, offers the reader a quick and chewy Cliff’s Notes of the Damned. Writers, voyeurs and casual scholars who are looking for resource material on serial killers will want to pick this book up. True crime fanatics interested in a fast run-down drive-by overview of the 20th century’s greatest murderous acts will find this a chilling and satisfying compendium.

I’d like to commend Raw Dog Screaming Press for having the nerve to bring this nasty and affordable collection into print. It’s a solid product, with illustrations by Joel Lipman, and a cover by Andi Olsen. It looks like the quality trade paperback it is. My only quibble is that the publisher should have thought to individualize the chapter headings. Some of the sections, because of style and format, tend to blur and blend, and it would have been helpful to look up to the top of the page and see the chapter heading on each page. For future collections I’d recommend this easy and thoughtful logistical fix.

15 Serial Killers is well worth reading, and will bear rereading in the future. It’s a solid resource book and an interesting volume. Taut, compelling, and as edgy as a freshly honed hunting knife, I can’t wait for the reality tv series to come out.

STEVE VERNON, born and raised in the Northern Ontario Shieldland, raised by a pack of wandering beatnik timberwolves, is currently huddled on the icy shores of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Steve's fiction has been published in THE HORROR SHOW, CEMETERY DANCE, HORROR GARAGE, KARL EDWARD WAGNER'S YEAR'S BEST HORROR, HORROR GARAGE, INHUMAN, ABYSS & APEX and many other markets and magazines. Try out Steve's novella of weird western horror, LONG HORN, BIG SHAGGY, (a tale of back-from-the-dead mountainmen, carrion stallions, and zombified buffalo), available from Amazon, Black Death Books or Shocklines. For more info on Steve check his website: http://users.eastlink.ca/~stevevernon