American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years, 1950-2000
by Peter Vronsky
Berkley, 2021

Author Peter Vronsky, a specialist serial killers – his epic, Sons of Cain: A History of Serial Killers from the Stone Age to the Present, is an indispensable volume on the subject – turns in his new book to a bubble, a contained explosion of his ghastly subject, a half-century period in American history in which serial killers were more numerous and more industrious at their work, and even more lionized by a popular culture saturated in all things Hannibal Lecter. Vronsky mentions that the great Harold Schechter has semi-ironically referred to the 19th and early 20th century as the golden age of serial killers, and in American Serial Killers: The Epidemic Years 1950-2000 he moves the frame forward. This book covers the age of Ted Bundy, Edmund Kemper, John Wayne Gacy, the Son of Sam, and Jeffrey Dahmer; as Vronsky points out, of the 2,604 known serial killers in US history during the 20th century, 89.5 percent struck during the period from 1970 to 1999. “The numbers,” as he writes, “speak for themselves.”

The numbers might speak for themselves, but they don't tell any of the stories Vronsky tells in these gripping pages as he follows a coterie of future serial killers from the “epidemic” years as they go through their childhoods and formative young years. Vronsky has a great deal of experience researching these stories and then rendering them in vividly readable prose. He adopts a narrative tone throughout that's harsh but fascinated toward the monsters he's chronicling.

And the stories he tells share many characteristics, of course – the serial killer “profile” is by now fairly well-known: an overbearing mother, an absent or weak father-figure, a tendency to bed-wetting, a penchant for arson and for torturing and killing small animals or house pets, and a prevalence of being bullied and ostracized by other children. “It's hard to say whether childhood peers reject the child because of his weirdness,” Vronsky writes about this last, social element, “resulting in frustrated and violent behavior further alienating the child from his peers, or it's the violent behavior that leads childhood peers to reject their playmate.” In either case, the result is intense loneliness and a retreat into fantasies of violent retribution.

Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, as Vronsky describes it, his future epidemic of serial killers was growing and developing - “like a nest of squirming baby snakes” - while the world around them did its level best to damage the mental stability of every person in the Western hemisphere:

The last of our 1950s innocence, which had lingered on into the 1960s even after the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 scared everyone shitless, finally died on Friday afternoon, November 22, 1963, when JFK was assassinated in Dallas. Those of us who were kids back then remember faithfully turning in the next day to see our favorite cartoon friends on Saturday morning TV and being shocked to find them all preempted by coverage of the assassination. Nothing was for sure after that.

Growing throughout Vronsky's account is a mounting public fascination with his subject, almost a domestication of the whole concept of a serial killer, to the point where, in a book-series like Jeff Lindsay's “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” novels, the handsome serial killer is actually the hero of the show. Vronsky himself is fascinated with serial killers – but from a properly moral place of intellectual revulsion. The broader scope of his book might be implicitly arguing that the collective traumas of postwar America (to say nothing of the Vietnam War specifically) played an active part in creating the epidemic of serial killers he studies, but Vronsky is quite rightly impatient with any trivialization of the subject: “I've lost count of how many radio and podcast interviews I have done where I am asked, 'Who is your favorite serial killer?' or 'If you were a serial killer, what kind would you be?'” he writes. “My response is usually 'The kind who eats podcast hosts who ask stupid questions.'”

Vronsky's “epidemic” years have an end-point; he notes that the numbers are falling – a hopeful development, although not quite knowing its causes is naturally worrying. If a new epidemic is currently incubating, we can at least hope Vronksy is on the case to analyze it.

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.