My Pet Serial Killer

Natural Born Killers meets Fifty Shades of Grey in Seidlinger’s penetrating tale of a sociopathic puppet-mistress and the ruthless murderer whom she controls. Claire Wilkinson is a 26-year-old graduate student immersed in her forensics studies; Victor Hent is a suave operator whom the media dubs the “gentleman killer.” Working in tandem, the pair seduce dozens of women from the local bar scene and bring them home to a soundproofed room in Claire’s apartment where Victor tortures and kills them. The two make a perfectly erotically entwined couple until Victor chafes at Claire’s dominance and she decides to teach him a lesson. The novel’s second half is a road trip through hell in which Claire and a handful of her new acolytes cross the country, brutally murdering her pre-Victor serial-killer exes. The book is narrated from Claire’s viewpoint and although circumstances of some of the killings she describes stretch credulity, her clinical dispassion towards her victims and her canny assessment of the desperation of pick-up scenes where victims are easily found is eerie and unsettling. Seidlinger (Falter Kingdom) includes chapters written as mock appraisals of slasher-film dynamics that implicate the reader as a voyeuristic witness. This thoroughly unsettling novel is a cut above other serial-killer stories. (Sept.)