Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
by Caroline Fraser.
Penguin Press, 466 pp., $32.00
A book of judgment. A guide to mayhem.
What is a smelter? It is a commercial volcano, melting rocks for metal. It is the Götterdämmerung. If you are one of those people who think rock is a solid, think again: it burns.
—Murderland
So long have serial killers been a staple of American popular entertainment—films (Zodiac, Se7en, Badlands, Natural Born Killers, The Silence of the Lambs, Monster, Longlegs), TV series (Dexter, Criminal Minds, True Detective, The Fall, Mindhunter), true crime documentaries and podcasts (This Is the Zodiac Speaking, The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, Gone Girls: The Long Island Serial Killer, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes,…