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Leonard Cassuto The Cultural Work of Serial Killers A 2002 entry in the syndicated daily comic strip "The Born Loser" shows the meek title character in a restaurant asking how the place serves liver. With "fava beans and a nice Chianti," the waiter informs him, and the would-be diner runs away in horror (21 May 2002). The humor here (if there can be said to be any) comes from a reference to the dining preferences of Hannibal "the Cannibal" Leder in Thomas Harris's 1988 The Silence ofthe Lambs. Lecter, the most famous fictional serial killer in literary history, is also a gourmet, and he likes his human liver with fava beans and chianti. Why are serial killers sudi a staple of popular entertainment these days? The prominence of The Silence of the Lambs (aided by Jonathan Demme's Oscar-winning 1990 film adaptation of the novel) surely has something to do with it, but why such a reception for that story? What's so fascinating about Hannibal Lecter that he has become an American cultural icon? Harris's novels—especially Red Dragon (1981), as well as The Silence ofthe Lambs—set out the standard formula for serial killer fare. First, the detective (often a forensic specialist of some kind) discovers what the killer has been up to. Through criminological study of postmortem accounts, usually coupled with examination of an active crime scene, the pattern of the killer—his grisly signature—is established. The detective (and the reader) learn that the killer is fiendishly creative, crafty, and sadistically cruel. Over the course of the narrative, the killer's personal history is gradually revealed, allowing us to learn how he became a monster. We get to know the detective better at the same time, and usually we learn that he (or she) is troubled—even tortured—by some combination of a lousy personal life and the related pressure of living in one's own head when one has been trained to think like a serial killer in order to catch them. Then the killer strikes again, kidnapping a new victim, virtually always a young woman. The snatch creates a tension which will endure to the end of the story, as the detective, often backed by a law enforcement bureaucracy of some kind, races to rescue the woman before the killer commences his torture and murder ritual. The story culminates in the collision ofdetective and killer, just in the nick of time to save the woman. The killer almost always dies rather than have to face the question, "Why did you do this?" Confession of motive may be a staple of traditional mystery stories, but the serial killer almost invariably loses his life before he would have to confess or plead for it. Stopping the dangerous killer usually brings the detective some palpable peace of mind, and this peace—rather than any focus on the victims—provides the resolution of the story. Scores of serial killer stories draw on elements of Harris's formula. Consider Dean Koontz's bestselling 1995 novel Intensity, which features 220 the minnesota review a killer named Edgier Vess (think "effervescence") who is on a quest to live deeply and sensually through the repeated experience of killing other people in various thrilling and creative ways. During one of his kills (of a family in rural California), an unnoticed guest, Chyna Shepard, escapes and sneaks aboard Vess's mobile home because she hears him brag about keeping a female captive at his house, and she needs to learn where he lives. Chyna hides, is discovered, escapes again, frees the captive, confronts Vess, and manages to kill him just before he can kill her and his captive. In the aftermath, she adopts the captive girl, a teenager whose family had been killed by Vess a year before. Intensity fits the master's formula fairly closely. Chyna Shepard is patterned after Harris's Clarice Starling of The Silence ofthe Lambs. Like Starling, she is tortured by the memory of a harsh childhood marked by absent parents . Like Starling, she bonds with female victims of the killer she's pursuing . And like Starling, she has a hard and gritty core that...

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