Academic literature on the topic 'Serial murderers – Fiction'

Serial killers fascinate people and books, films, TV series and other types of entertainment increasingly cater to this interest providing sensationalized media coverage. The theory suggests that the boundaries are blurred considerably between fact and fiction, even for the serial killers themselves. For many people, serial killers are both frightening and attractive enough to motivate them to go on tours and visit sites, museums and other attractions that are associated with them. This paper explores the motivation for consuming true and fictional crime including murders and serial killing with an emphasis on literature, films, TV series as well as tourism. A content analysis of the websites of walking tours, museums and other attractions connected to fictional and real serial killers was undertaken, as well as a questionnaire with a niche sample of respondents who commented on their experience and perceptions of serial killers within a dark tourism context. The results suggest that while tourists tend to prefer real serial killers to fictional ones, only a small number of tourists actually engage in this form of dark tourism. Their motivations tend to be more connected to education or entertainment rather than a morbid obsession with death or tragedy.

Murderesses are not among the stock characters of Ottoman prose stories, but they give us a rare opportunity to discuss how being a woman and committing a crime is represented in literary fiction. They also give us the opportunity to discuss how these stories might have been perceived by their audiences. With that in mind, I suggest a close reading of a story that I will summarize here. The story raises questions regarding narratives, gender, and honor as represented and perceived in fiction.

This roundtable on women and crime was inspired by a discussion at a CUNY Dissections Seminar in April 2021, where Gülhan Balsoy presented her work in progress on Ottoman crime fiction in the early 20th century. The focus of her paper was a popular murder mystery series called The National Collection of Murders, which had been published in Istanbul in 1914. The protagonists of this fictional crime series were a mother and daughter known as the Dark Witch and the Bloody Fairy, who led an underground criminal gang living in a secret subterranean world beneath the city of Istanbul. While reading her paper the night before the seminar, I could not help but notice striking parallels between this fictional Ottoman murder mystery and the sensationalized media coverage of a 1921 Egyptian serial murder case, popularly known by the name of its alleged perpetrators, Raya and Sakina. In both the fictive Ottoman story and the Egyptian media coverage of a real crime, two sets of female relatives were presented as the respective leaders of a criminal gang that stole luxury goods from respectable families and turned their homes into human slaughterhouses. In both cases, the female gang leaders used “superstition” to deceive and trap their victims while continually outwitting the police, all against a backdrop of illicit sex.

Serial killers have been a popular topic in literature for centuries, appearing in works of fiction, non-fiction, and even poetry. In literature, serial killers often represent the dark side of human nature, and their stories often explore the depths of depravity and the psychological motivations behind their heinous acts. Examples of serial killers can be found throughout history and mythology. With all that the public’s attention is usually focused on the serial murders of the latest decades, with the historical cases still generally remaining in the obscure. The reason for that lack of publicity is that serial killers in antiquity are difficult to identify, because the concept of serial killing is a relatively modern one. One of the pleasant exceptions is a book by Debbie Felton “Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myths and History” published by University of Texas Press, 2021, 235 pp., ISBN: 978-1-4773-2357-1 (paperback edition). This article reviews the book and comments on its contents and style.

Are there some lessons teachers should not teach, even if they are the thing that the student most needs? Can an “education” go too far? In this work of philosophical fiction, the main character is Quinn, an AI teacher set in the distant future. It, along with other AI teachers, are tasked with educating the most difficult students with the promise of “free study.” Quinn accepts a particularly difficult student, in fact, an “impossible student” named Leticia, a young girl who is showing early, but clear, signs of growing up to be a murderer. Quinn accepts this “impossible job” because the newer AI models are being released and she is at risk of being retired as they replace her model. Quinn decides the only way to jar Leticia out of her current direction is to shame her by supporting, encouraging, and showing her the results of her murderous impulses. At first Leticia appreciates the acceptance of her anti-social behavior, even after seeing the results of death and war. In the end, Leticia changes her mind when a serial killer she admires escapes the training exercise Quinn has put him in and puts her family in real danger. Quinn will be admitted to free study.

Literature is the key to human life that resurrects and gives space for introspection, retrospection and various remembrances which are hued by overjoy, pain and trauma. Nowadays crime literature became one of the most popular genres in this era which centers mostly on murder and violence. It started from Edgar Allen Poe’s most famous fictional character Auguste Dupin, whose first appearance was on The Murders in the Rue Mogue, considered to be the first crime fiction, followed by Dr. John Watson, Sherlock Holmes and the like. The genre crime fiction has contributed innumerable number of works in both fiction and non-fiction. Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Rising is one such fiction which tells about the life of a serial killer who is a psychiatrist as well as a cannibal. It is a series of novels about the famous character Hannibal Lecter. Cannibalism and Psychiatry are two extremes which rarely meet. This novel is intertwined with a mix of violence, emotions and childhood trauma. Trauma studies nowadays became a key aspect in literature. In this specific work of Thomas Harris, he describes how the centralized character is affected with psychological trauma, in particular, Acute and Separation trauma. Trauma theory became popularized in 1980s and played major role in Atwood’s novels. This study tries to explain how childhood shapes a person and how behaviorism plays a vital element in one’s life and it also tries to analyze the psychological issues, trauma and defense mechanism through the central character of the novel.

The research deals with the issue of genre hybridization in the novel “Silence – Chronicle of a Killer” written by a contemporary Austrian writer Thomas Raab. An examination of the novel's composition and structure, as a text in motion, has been accomplished in the article. The novel “Silence” is an excellent illustration of how the genre of adventure has been adapted to include elements of science fiction. This novel is a love tale, a rural life saga, a formation narrative, and a psychological thriller all in one. As a fictionalized account of the life of a serial murderer with hypersensitive hearing who became a legend for his mental torment and suffering, it serves both as a biography and a thriller. Novelist Raab uses elements from classic horror novels like Frankenstein, German romantics, in particular, G. Kleist, the tale of Casper Hauser, and detective novels like Friedrich Durrenmatt's "Promise" to tell the story of Casper Hauser's disappearance in his book. A new aesthetic experience may be formed at various degrees of identification ranging from naive perception to higher levels of literary reception. Concentration is required for poetic and philosophical substance. Michel Focalut's nomadism, marginality, and authoritarian power rhetoric have been discussed in this article. The novel's ultimate content has been disclosed as the aphesis torment, emotional sublimation, as the birth of an artwork and, at the same time, death of the author, who exposes discourses, accountable for creating texts that are allocated to him.

The Dexter TV show, much like the literary series it is closely adapted from, features detective hero Dexter Morgan who, though a blood-spatter analyst and killer hunter, is also a serial killer himself. Unlike other killers featured in fiction though, his murderous actions are specifically code-driven; he only pursues dangerous criminals who escape the law. It is because the show encourages readers to empathise with this somewhat unusual detective that the show attracted not only academic attention from television analysts, philosophers, psychologists, linguists and cultural studies specialists, but significant opposition from such groups as the US Parents Television Council as well. Regardless of whose ideologies it is that the show implies exactly, this article turns to direct viewer-derived data instead, in the form of selected internet forum messages over the first 5 episodes of the fifth series of the show (screened in the USA in the autumn of 2010). The critical linguistic analysis of this data uncovers the ways in which real viewers actually respond to serial killer-related ideologies with respect, for instance, to attitudes toward extreme crime and victim typology in US society. Through a discussion of specific message board strings from Showtime’s online Dexter forum, the article not only accounts for evidence with respect to the show’s implied ideologies, but more particularly investigates viewer reactions to them also.

Abstract This paper explores why unreliable narration should be considered as a concept not only applying to single works of fiction, but also to whole series of fiction, and why impersonal (›omniscient‹) narration can also be suspected of unreliability. Some literary genres show a great affinity to unreliable narration. In fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), for instance, the reader’s »hesitation« towards which reality system rules within the fictive world often is due to the narration of an autodiegetic narrator whose credibility is not beyond doubt. Detective stories, in contrast, are usually set in a purely realistic world (in conflict with no other reality system) and typically do not foster any doubts regarding the reliability of their narrators. The only unreliable narrators we frequently meet in most detective stories are suspects who, in second level narrations, tell lies in order to misdirect the detective’s enquiries. Their untruthfulness is usually being uncovered at the end of the story, in the final resolution of the criminalistics riddle (›Whodunnit‹?), as part of the genre-typical ›narrative closure‹. As the new genre of detective novels emerged at the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, its specific genre conventions got more and more well-established. This made it possible for writers to playfully change some of these readers’ genre expectations – in order to better fulfil others. Agatha Christie, for example, in 1926 dared to undermine the »principle of charity« (Walton) that readers give to the reliability of first person narrators in detective stories – especially when such a narrator shows himself as being a close friend to the detective at work, as it was the case with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Dr. Watson, friend to Sherlock Holmes. Christie dared to break this principle by establishing a first-person narrator who, at the end, turns out to be the murderer himself. Thus, she evades the »principle of charity«, but is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention because she achieves a very astonishing resolution at the end of the case and thus reaches to fulfil another and even more crucial genre convention, that of a surprising ›narrative closure‹, in a very new and satisfying way. Fantastic literature and detective novels are usually two clearly distinct genres of narrative fiction with partly incommensurate genre conventions. Whereas in fantastic literature (in the narrower sense of the term), two reality systems collide, leaving the reader in uncertainty about which one of the two finally rules within the fictive world, detective novels usually are settled in a ›simply realistic‹ universe. Taking a closer look at a contemporary series of detective fiction, that is, the Dublin stories of Tana French (2007–), I will turn to an example in which the genre convention of ›intraserial coherence‹ provides evidence for the unreliability of the different narrators – whereas with regard only to each single volume of the series, each narrator could be perceived as being completely reliable. As soon as we have several narrators telling stories that take place within the same fictive world, unreliable narration can result from inconsistencies between the statements of the different narrators about what is fictionally true within this universe. Additionally, the Tana French example is of special interest for narratology because in one of the volumes, an impersonal and seemingly omniscient narrator appears. Omniscient narration is usually being regarded as incompatible with unreliability, but, as Janine Jacke has already shown, in fact is not: Also impersonal narration can mire in contradictions and thus turn out to be unreliable. With regard to Tana French’s novel, I would add that it can also be mistrusted because the utterances of this narration can conflict with those of other narrators in other volumes of the same series. So in the light of serial narration, the old question of whether impersonal narration (or an omniscient narrator) can be unreliable at all should be reconsidered. In the case of narrative seriality, the evidence for ascribing unreliability to one of its alternating narrators need not be found in the particular sequel narrated by her/him but in other sequels narrating about events within the same story world. Once again, narrative unreliability turns out to be a category rather of interpretation than of pure text analysis and description. Again, Tana French like previously Agatha Christie is not being penalised by readers and critics for having broken this one genre convention of letting her detective stories take place in a purely ›realistic‹ universe because today, genre conventions are merging more and more. Tana French achieves an even more tempting ›narrative tension‹ by keeping her readers in continuous uncertainty about whether a little bit of magic might be possible in the otherwise so quotidian world of her fictive detectives. Thus, the author metafictionally (and, later also overtly) flirts with the genre of »urban fantasy«, practicing a typical postmodern merging of well-established, hitherto distinct popular genres.

Resumo: Tomando um conjunto considerável de textos de Lúcio Cardoso e reproduzindo trechos de seus artigos, dos Diários (2012), da Crônica da casa assassinada (1959), de manuscritos inéditos, de cartas, assim como fragmentos de entrevistas e depoimentos que concedeu, este artigo pretende apresentar o projeto ficcional do escritor mineiro em torno de uma cidade imaginária. A hipótese defendida é a de que o romance de 1959 integraria um grande ciclo que recebeu o nome de Crônica da cidade assassinada nos manuscritos dos Diários e cujo propósito seria narrar a história de decadência e destruição de uma pequena cidade, situada pelo romancista na Zona da Mata Mineira. O título do ciclo tem sido associado ao do romance, como se designasse a mesma obra, ideia que é contestada no texto.Palavras-chave: Cardoso, Lúcio (1912-1968); romance brasileiro; criação (literária, artística etc.)Abstract: Observing a considerable collection of Lúcio Cardoso’s texts and citing excerpts from his articles, from Diários (Diaries), 2012, from Crônica da casa assassinada (Chronicle of the Murdered House), 1959, from unpublished manuscripts, from letters, as well as from fragments of magazines and the author’s testimonials, this paper aims at presenting the author’s fictional project regarding an imaginary city. The hypothesis defended is that the 1959 novel would integrate a significant cycle titled Crônica da cidade assassinada (Chronicle of the Murdered Town) in the manuscripts from Diários (Diaries), whose purpose would be to narrate the history of the decay and destruction of a small town, placed by the novelist in the Zona da Mata Mineira. The title of the cycle has been associated to the one of the novel, as if it refers to the same work, an idea that is questioned in the text.Keywords: Cardoso, Lúcio (1912-1968); Brazilian novel; creation (literary, artistic etc.)

by Wan, Rosa.
Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1999.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 118-127).
Abstracts in English and Chinese.
Abstract --- p.i
Table of Contents --- p.v
Acknowledgments --- p.vi
Chapter Chapter One --- Introduction: The Empire of the Serial Killers --- p.1
Chapter Chapter Two --- Stereotyping in Serial Killer Movies and Bestsellers --- p.26
Chapter Chapter Three --- Inter-serial-textuality --- p.68
Chapter Chapter Four --- Controversies --- p.103
Conclusion --- p.113
Works Cited --- p.118
Appendix --- p.128

In this chapter the real events that inspired Cruising are described and give the novel its context. In the 1960s detective Randy Jurgensen set out to investigate a series of brutal murders within the gay leather scene. This essay explores Jurgensen’s investigation and brings us to journalist Arthur Bell’s article on a very similar series of killings, which were the impulse for Friedkin to finally direct the film.

In consonance with several contemporary television series in which one of their main narrative purposes is to delve into the murderer’s universe, this research focuses on the representation of some of the most relevant fictional serial killers (i.e., Dexter Morgan, Hannibal Lecter, Norman Bates, or Joe Carroll). Specifically, this chapter deepens different resources used to enhance the persuasive attraction that defines these monstrous protagonists. Firstly, from a narrative perspective, the study explores some of the key-elements in the humanization process of the character, such as motivations, traumas, and personal relationships. Secondly, from a mise-en-scène approach, the chapter examines the construction of the serial killer and the environment he inhabits as defining mechanisms. Finally, the socio-cultural context in which these shows are produced is also analyzed, studying some of the essential reasons of the re-emergence of these characters.

Abstract The murder that Lew Griffin commits in the first chapter of Long-Legged Fly has a visceral, firsthand intensity that impresses itself indelibly on the reader ‘s mind. The protagonist in this scene becomes likethe criminal in a very disturbing way: ‘Nigger ‘s gonna carve you up like you did her[. . .] I let him see the knife in my hand then, a leatherworker ‘s knife [. . .] Then I bent down and opened his wasted belly with the knife ‘ (Sallis [1992] 1996: 4–5, my italics). Sallis ‘s intention of turning the murderer of this dark vignette into the protagonist of his series is accomplished by his authorial act of opening Lew to our view, often as brutally and degradingly as Lew has opened the terrified addict.

In Superman: Red Son (2003), Mark Millar reimagines America’s fictional “Man of Steel” as the surrogate son and ideological heir of Joseph Stalin, Soviet Russia’s historical “man of steel.” In doing so, Millar and his collaborators reimagine the power dynamics of the Cold War and grapple with questions of villainy and heroism in such a redefined political landscape. This essay considers how, in separating Superman’s idealized morality from his ideological association with America, Red Son challenges the reader’s conceptions of “good” and “evil” and raises questions about leadership, hero worship, terrorism, and the influence of political ideologies on our ideas of ends versus means. This was particularly poignant in the three-issue series’ consideration of national security and mass surveillance, a theme that continues to be relevant even as it was especially effectual for the post-9/11 moment in which the series was released.

This chapter explores the enduring myths about the phenomenon of serial murder generally and serial killers in particular, in Britain between 1960 to the present. The Chapter argues that many of these myths have been created and continue to be perpetuated by the print and broadcast media. It is suggested that this process was ignited by American popular culture about serial murder, to the extent that many British students engaged on university courses do so because they want to emulate the heroine of the popular novel The Silence of the Lambs and become the fictional character, Clarice Starling. This observation is used to explore other myths about offender profiling, the role of the profiler in police investigations and the idea that this involves entering the mind of the serial killer by the profiler. Based on his own applied work with serial murderers and on police investigations and after their conviction, the chapter reveals the realities of the phenomenon of serial murder, serial killers and the limits of offender profiling. The chapter uses a number of situations encountered during police investigations and with serial killers to illustrate its arguments. It concludes that we need to harness, rather than dismiss, student interests in this territory in more productive ways. It adopts a structural/victim perspective about serial murder, as opposed to a relentless focus on what might motivate the serial killer to kill. The chapter suggests how this might be done both within the academy and, more broadly in public policy.

The chapter begins with perhaps the most famous quotation to emerge from the Great Depression: Franklin Roosevelt’s assertion that the only thing Americans had to fear was fear itself, which sounds good in theory but may not have reflected reality. To test that reading, the chapter examines various sources of fear in the Great Depression: a serial murderer in Cleveland; the polio epidemic that broke out in New York City in the summer of 1931; and the nearly constant fear of unemployment that characterized life during the Great Depression and made its way into the fiction of the period, including Helen Hunt’s Hardy Perennial. The chapter argues that what these sources have in common is a concern for the purity and autonomy of being, the nature or essence of a person, and the dread that such being might be violated and despoiled by impersonal but malevolent forces.

This chapter discusses the other serial killers in the cinema before Hannibal Lecter. In 1959, the writer Robert Bloch was inspired by the gruesome case of the Wisconsin mass murderer Ed Gein, with his keepsakes of bones and human skin. He transmuted elements of the Gein case into the phenomenally successful Psycho (published 1959), reconfiguring the real-life Gein as the chubby, unprepossessing mother's boy Norman Bates, who dispatches a variety of victims in gruesome fashion. Subsequently, Alfred Hitchcock's adaptation of the novel (1960) laid down the parameters for a variety of genres: the serial killer movie, the slasher film, and the modern big-budget horror film which utilises above-the-title stars rather than the journeyman actors who had populated such fare previously. But above all else, Hitchcock and his talented screenwriter Joseph Stefano created a template for the intelligent, richly developed, and charismatic fictional serial killer in their version of Norman Bates. Hitchcock's film was to influence a generation of film-makers and writers; among them Thomas Harris.

For its conceptualization of How to Get Away with Murder’s serial storytelling as looped seriality, the chapter highlights the show’s investment in temporal loops, as well as the loops between viewer responses and the show itself, recalling the “feedback loop” of seriality studies. The research of feminist audience studies, for example, on soap operas, feminized ‘guilty pleasures,’ fandom, or viewer communities, provides relevant starting points. Additionally, the chapter utilizes methodological conceptions of ‘Black Twitter,’ second screen viewing, and social television. Three areas emerge as especially relevant to explore how the interactivity of looped seriality surfaces in the show’s Twittersphere. First, the chapter relates the 'Who Dunnit'-hashtags to the conventions of detective fiction or murder mysteries. Second, the chapter interrogates internet humor and specifically memes and GIFs as another crucial site of looped audience engagements. In a third instance, looped seriality is applied to understand the show and the viewers' interactive reciprocity when it comes to the ritualized consumption of (alcoholic) beverages and snacks as a different kind of TV dinner.

Through readings of Poe's Dupin trilogy and Melville's “Bartleby,” this chapter develops the concept of a pragmatics of behavior, highlighting the way that formal and narratological choices steer a reader’s ad hoc epistemic stance in real time. By focalizing these texts through narrators who shift from one psychological model to another under pressure from a seemingly inexplicable series of actions (whether human or, in the case of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” of ambiguous origin), Poe and Melville not only define a spectrum of epistemic stances toward the propositional contents of other minds, but also indicate the utilitarian goals of enforcing laws, managing subordinates, and maintaining a good-enough social harmony that inform even the most abstract theories of will and psychological interiority. As tightly controlled as philosophical thought experiments, these fictions delineate the conditions under which behaviorist explanations and predictions are more successful than intentionalist ones.