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Psycho Paths: Tracking the Serial Killer Through Contemporary American Film and Fiction, by Philip L. Simpson (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), ISBN: 0809329X, 244pp., $ 15.00.
Philip Simpson's Psycho Paths is a thoughtful and articulate examination of the serial murderer's representation in the works of what he defines as 'serious contemporary American writers and film directors', as opposed to 'tabloid journalism and cheap fiction' (ix). Ranging from Paul West's The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper and Thomas Harris's Red Dragon to Joyce Carol Oates's Zombie and Dominic Sena's Kalifornia, Simpson takes up, as his central point of interrogation, the question of the serial killer's popularity from the 1980s to the present - why he provides such a satisfying figure for philosophical and political considerations, and why he has such a simultaneously fascinating and repulsive appeal in contemporary consumer culture. As a cipher and an essentially indeterminate figure, the serial killer can be deployed ideologically to promote both a Reaganite or New Right agenda, for he can be made to represent the dangerous consequences of spiritual laxity and a hedonistic disregard for family values, and a feminist agenda, for he can be made to represent an extreme but entirely symptomatic form of pervasive misogyny in American culture. Although the serial murderer thus offers a political nexus, Simpson tends to be more interested in the way that the killer is used to articulate subversion, the way that contemporary novelists and filmmakers imagine him as a 'debased and traumatized visionar[y]' (14), rather than...