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This essay explores the eroticized violence of the serial-killer romance or "snuff fiction," tracing the history of the "lust-killer" from his Gothic roots to his post-Gothic incarnations, and exploring the genre's penetrating critique of pop-culture romance conventions through its brutal portrayals of the homicidal romance.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuffthat will abate it
-Shakespeare, Hamlet
We spring from "generations of murderers," claims Freud, with "the lust for killing in their blood" (297). It is perhaps no accident that Freud speaks here of murder in terms of "lust" (and famously, elsewhere, of lust in terms of murder): desire and violence often share a representational lexicon, borrowing from a register of urgency that reaches out of appetite toward satiation. This satiation, however, may bring in its very gratification what William Ian Miller calls the "sickness of surfeit" (110). Claudius's suggestively phallic reference to love's "wick" figures a passion that destroys itself through its own intemperance: in depicting a flame snuffing itself in the liquid generated by its own heat, Claudius's words epitomize Hamlet's claustrophobic idiom of excess, wherein love chokes in an "excess of the good" that transforms "the desired" into "the disgusting"; thus, "disgust has a kind of inevitable connection with the satisfaction of desire" (110-11). For Miller, the central paradox of disgust is its "allure," its ability to simultaneously repel and attract (108). Pierre Bourdieu calls disgust "the paradoxical experience of enjoyment extorted by violence" (488) and, in language marrying dread and desire, describes the "ambivalent experience" of this enjoyment as "the horrible seduction" (6).
It is such seduction-ambiguous, immoderate, and contradictory-that this essay investigates. Specifically, it explores the post-Gothic serial-killer romance, a fiction in which the killer eroticizes rather than justifies or hides his acts of murder, and in which murderous representations intensify the Gothic's longstanding concern with the intersections of desire and violence by adding to it an alertness to "murder's undetermined, metaphysical dimension" (Black 6) and its implications for subjectivity, authenticity, and narrative. The Gothic has always raised questions about the nature of the human subject, through its abhuman figures, its abject transgressions, and its bold boundary-crossings of bodily and cultural categories. Further, the Gothic has, since its inception, evinced an ongoing...