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.)