Bibliokitty

I think we have an unhealthy obsession with true crime. There is a plethora of true crime podcasts to listen to, and Ryan Murphy keeps churning out one true crime miniseries after another on Netflix. A recent series of Murphy’s, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, is about the serial killer who killed at least seventeen men between the years 1978 and 1991. Evan Peters played Jeffrey Dahmer and there was some online chatter about how empathetic he portrayed Dahmer, which led to some viewers developing a crush on him as he portrayed a serial killer. The family members of Dahmer’s victims said they were not consulted about the series. They have had old wounds ripped open and watched their lives turned into entertainment without their permission. But nobody cares what the people who survive monsters like Dahmer think, so long as they can produce content to satiate the public’s thirst for these “intriguing” men who commit murder. Danya Kukafka subverts this disturbing mania for serial killers in her thought-provoking novel Notes on an Execution, where the serial killer’s life is told through the perspective of the women in his life, revealing that there is nothing intriguing about serial killers after all.

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I came across Cult Classic on a BuzzFeed listicle of books to read. It sounded interesting enough to me that when I later found it on the BookOutlet website, I decided to add it to my order. I needed something light to read after Demon Copperhead, and the blurbs on the back over of Cult Classic describe it as “funny” and “romantic”, so I thought it would do the trick. After a slow start, I found Cult Classic to be an interesting read, but not the rom-com I was expecting. I did not find it very funny, more like mildly amusing.

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Demon Copperhead is a modern take on Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield – they have a similar narrative structure and many of the characters have the same names. Demon Copperhead is set in the 1990s and early 2000s and is about an orphaned boy caught up in the opioid crisis in the poor mining communities targeted by Purdue Pharma (the makers of OxyContin). The protagonist is Damon Fields, nicknamed Demon Copperhead because of the copper-coloured hair he inherited from his father who died before he was born, who grows up in Lee County, Virginia. Demon Copperhead, like David Copperfield, is a likeable character that you want to root for, but unlike David, Demon tends towards self-destruction instead of striving to change his situation, which is understandable growing up in a part of the country that has been ravaged by opioids and made the butt of many hillbilly jokes. Demon Copperhead is a heavy read, but I think it is a great novel.

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