I Am Not a Serial Killer

Back cover: John works in his family’s mortuary and has an obsession with serial killers. He wants to be a good person, but fears he is a sociopath, and for years he has suppressed his dark side through a strict system of rules designed to mimic 'normal' behavior.
Then a demon begins stalking his small town and killing people one by one, and John is forced to give in to his darker nature in order to save them. As he struggles to understand the demon and find a way to kill it, his own mind begins to unravel until he fears he may never regain control. Faced with the reality that he is, perhaps, more monstrous than the monster he is fighting, John must make a final stand against the horrors of both the demon and himself.

"Mrs Anderson was dead."

So this month is horror (two guesses why) and we're starting with this YA horror thriller hybrid genre-crossing thing. I wouldn't classify this as YA. Young adult is about more than the protagonist's age, it's also about their perspective, and around the time the MC thinks of the kids at his school as children I decided that this was definitely more horror than YA. Me, when I was a teen, I thought of the people I went to school with as 'the other kids'. Children has a patronising tone to it that kids lacks, and the fact that the MC doesn't include himself among them -- he doesn't say 'the other children' just 'the children' -- makes me think this kid is older than his years. Of course, being a sociopath who lacks the normal teenage emotion-driven responses and has rules to keep himself in line, it makes sense that he would have a more adult perspective. He's capable of assessing and, more importantly, controlling his emotions in a way most teens can't. Ergo, not young adult.

Maybe surprising, but probably not, the horror came more from riding around in the mind of a teen sociopath than it did from the serial killing demon he was hunting. It's not exactly the rules he has to keep himself from becoming a serial killer-- if he starts paying too much attention to one person he has to go a week without looking at them, no interaction with animals, hang out with another outcast so he's not quite as socially marooned. It's not his obsession with serial killers and his interest in the corpses at his mother's mortuary. It's the 'small' things, like accidentally calling a girl it, the same way he does with corpses and the demon. It's the fact that he can accidentally dehumanise someone and make stalking sound completely rational and almost romantic. You know, creepy stuff like that.

And this book doesn't hold back. There's obviously the gore of seeing the embalming process and a demon killing people, but Wells also shows us that this kid really is messed up. We learn that John went through the serial killer phase of animal abuse until he realised that other people thought that was wrong and made himself stop. It was perfectly rational to him. He wets the bed, another common factor among serial killers, and when he witnesses a murder he pees himself. Only in one of the six or so thrillers I read, where people were actually about to be killed, did anyone wet themselves, despite this happening in real life. It might be realistic, but I guess it's not very sexy for your terrified heroine to be found by her handsome cop with a big wet patch down her front. We get a very unadulterated view into a sociopath's mind and life and, strangely enough, it's scary. Maybe not something that's going to give you nightmares, but it's a lot easier to shrug off a vampire or a demon than a sociopath who just sees you as a thing and wonders what your insides look like.

'Salem's Lot
The Reapers are the Angels
The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories