Customer Reviews

Serial Killers: Death and Life in America's Wound Culture

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Mark Seltzer's fascinating book is not for the faithhearted. It is not an easy read, but it is therefore also not to be dismissed (as some reviewers here seem to do).

Seltzer's mind is quite keen. He is a penetrating reader of texts and culture. And he sees relationships where others might see separate phenomena. In many ways building on his previous book about machine culture in America and its relationship to various texts (_Bodies and Machines_), Seltzer here probes the interaction between serial violence in real life and in novels and film. Among other things, he maps the generative influence of the one upon the other, and vice versa.

This book will probably appeal more to scholars and graduate students than to a general readership, for along the way Seltzer does draw on various critical theorists, whom those uninitiated into the world of theory will no doubt find obscure. A recommendation for them might be a book by Seltzer's former colleague at Cornell, Jonathan Culler, _Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction_.

If, however, you are not searching for beach reading, but rather a serious, challenging, and often macabre, look at the ways in which our society is obsessed with violence, this is a book that will repay your close and sustained attention. Moreover, it will probably, like Seltzer's other work, rub off on you in some way and help you read texts -- and culture -- with a more critical eye.

I disagree with the other reviewer who praised this book for, among other things, its historical accuracy. This book has no claims to contribute to historical studies at all. It is a work in cultural studies, and shows all of the characteristics of that genre - obscure language, complex theories, loose historical claims, and a confusion between fictional and non-fictional sources. Obviously the analysis of fiction and non-fiction, together, is essential to the argument of the author, but as no attempt at historical or even literary context is attempted, one is left with a series of under-argued observations.

This is the worst example of cultural studies. The book is full of vague, insubstantiated claims, tenuous theoretical and historical connections, sweeping generalizations, and marred by a fatal lack of basic organization. Cultural studies doesn't have to be this simplistic and thin. Each chapter reads like a series of promises ("I will deal with this issue later in this chapter") that remain unfulfilled, as though the writer couldn't actually deliver on the task of real analysis, but can only give vague and hollow summary. Avoid it.

Curiously missing from this text is a discussion of the fiction of Poppy Z. Brite--particularly her novel Exquisite Corpse. This novel,strangely enough,prefigures the Andrew Cunanan(I hope I'm spelling his last name correctly)murder spree. Also, Seltzer shows no evidence of having read the work of intellectual historian Louis Kern. His essay on the splatterpunk phenomenon would have been useful to Seltzer's arguments.