Lots and Lots of Serial Killings: A Review of Michael J. Seidlinger's My Pet Serial Killer

I usually write reviews to get people thinking about books that I love, but I wanted to talk about Michael Seidlinger’s My Pet Serial Killer for different reasons. Mind you, I do love this book. However, I think there is a significant chance that this book will be misunderstood by a lot of people.

I think there will be an easy tendency to give into with this book to dismiss it as ‘serial killer fiction.’ People could easily spend their time focused all on that, like they did with American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. After all, it does involve serial killings — lots and lots of serial killings:

Hazel with her, big surprise, hazel eyes had that cherry flavor and he used saw blades he found in the alley on the way to her apartment.

Dawn was a musician of some sort, or at least she wanted to be. He talks about how she tasted wrong, just wrong, not like any of the others, and how he reacted, one end of the guitar as far into her as possible before she couldn’t take any more.

Hannah was his second gunshot. He got the gun barrel really deep inside her and he’s talking about how she really liked it, “Didn’t even ask if it was loaded or not,” and how she was honey-flavor too. The trigger pulled he made sure to be out of there in no time.

Ingrid was tattooed in all the wrong places but had the flavor of strawberry; her clitoral hood pierced, he tasted her for what felt like an hour, her moaning and loving it, gripping the back of his head, smothering his face with her flavor, as she oozed out more, mid orgasm, ecstatic…He did a little piercing her, piercing there, and she enjoyed it until he took the piercing gun right inside of her and pierced something that wasn’t meant to be pierced.

It is graphic. It is horrifying. However, there is much more going on.

To me at least, this book isn’t really about serial killing. It’s about Claire, nightmarish, frightening Claire. Claire is a forensic student who finds Victor, the serial killer, and makes him her pet. She houses him, finds him victims, and tells him what to do. She takes control of her pet serial killer and makes him satisfy her desires:

I’m wanting him to say it, and say it again. One more time.

He’s hesitating so I begin to pull him away but then he buckles, “I’m yours! I’m yours!” And then I’m telling him it’s all easy if you’re willing to do everything I say. As long as he lends every inch of himself as well as every aspect of his work, to me, everything will be taken care of. He’ll never be found and I’ll do all the finding for him.

No one will ever be the same.

*

The mystery will consume everyone and I’m the only one that’ll have known every inch. I’ll have seen everything before it turned into common knowledge. I’ll have been there, telling him what to erase and what to keep. And I’ll be saying to him every line that no one else will hear.

Claire is cold, though certainly is passionate at moments. She views people clinically, pondering how unseeing they are of each other and themselves, thoughtlessly performing roles that are mechanistic and pitiful. They have no ‘fight’ in them, and she needs someone who does. The important question is whether Victor has enough ‘fight’ within him to satisfy Claire . . . or whether anyone does.

Seidlinger has a great deal of subtlety in My Pet Serial Killer. It seems so easy to only see the killing, dramatically rendered as it is, and to not consciously register what lies beneath. I think readers will get it all on some level, but perhaps not at the forefront of their minds. Instead, I think they could get caught up in the surface happenings and only talk of this as a ‘serial killer book.’ To me, that would be a mistake. It would miss everything.

In summary, if I have one piece of advice to give you when reading My Pet Serial Killer, it’s pay close attention. Don’t assume that this is just a slasher-thriller, because it’s not. There are devious psychological manipulations going on while you read, and they reach much further than the confines of the pages. Like so many in the book, if you aren’t careful, Claire will be doing things to you as you read that you won’t even begin to guess at.  Victor would certainly tell you, there are consequences to only seeing Claire’s surface instead of ‘finding’ her.

On Michael J. Seidlinger's The Sky Conducting

I was sitting at a bar with a friend and when I went out to smoke he looked at my copy of The Sky Conducting.

After I came back in he said, “There are a lot of good lines in this.”

I agreed. The book is formed from one-sentence paragraphs that pile on top of each other, much like you might see in Nietszche, Wittgenstein, Markson, Noah Cicero, or Sam Pink.

It begins with instructions regarding how to read the book, like you would get for a piece of modern technology. Seidlinger seems to be saying that that novel can be “modern” too — it can be complex and advanced enough to require instructions. After reading this book, I couldn’t agree more.

The instructions discuss breathing while reading the text. This reminded me of the art piece “Body Pressure” by Bruce Nauman. Are the instructions to be followed, or broken, or both?

At first, I found some of the messages to be not very subtle. The premise of this book is that America “dies” . . . literally, like its collective heart stops beating. But then I realized there was a lot of playing around with the semantics of the abstract, ideological words that pervade our culture.

Similarly, I initially wondered about the “good” aspects of American culture that were being overlooked in the text, but this passed as well, because as the book progresses we get less abstraction and more humanity from the main characters, who are mostly all American (no pun intended).

The novel allowed me to reflect on how we are part of a stationary mimesis. The post-apocalyptic premise serves as a sort of metaphor for the nihilism/pessimism/stasis of the recession. Our dreams are equally hope and fiction, inspiration and irreality.

One of my favorite lines: “After all the talk about the end of the world the grand irony was that it actually happened.”

There is a lot of confronting the reader. Everything about this novel is confrontational.

A lot of times post-apocalyptic shit can be bleak as fuck, but Seidlinger balances both humor and humanity.

Sometimes technology has agency in this novel, and that gave me headaches. Of course, another one of my favorite lines was, “Headaches are good because they mean the mind is still working.”

There is a lot of black market trade in this book, and yet somehow it all seemed calmer and more humane the everyday American market we know. It seemed people related to people as people more, and that they were more direct in their relationships, in this book, whereas in the “real-life” marketplace people relate to cashiers and salesman and producers and consumers and customers and managers and middlemen. In today’s legal, and increasingly digital, markets we seem to relate more to abstractions than to humans.

By the end of the book the past tense takes over, there is no more present tense. This is how America is becoming. We can’t talk about the future, because we don’t know if we can believe in it.

The Empire That Once Was America

I’m a huge fan of dystopian/apocalyptic novels, mainly because — if crafted by good authors — they unravel an elegantly-weaved prescience into a gloomy and fast-approaching future we’ve recklessly created ourselves for ourselves. Think of Bradbury, Atwood, Gibson, Orwell, and of course Huxley’s Brave New World. In short, I am a fan of the Folly of Man, and all in favor of technology flipping the tables on us served in the form of a well-organized, worldwide revolution (helmed by the HAL 9000, naturally). I’m perfectly at peace knowing we’ll get what we deserve.

Michael Seidlinger’s new novel The Sky Conducting presents us with an America not too far destined; a country on the down slope of an empirical, majestic, and dirty decline, where all systems (political, social, familial, and otherwise) have failed. The America we find in The Sky Conducting has passed judgement on and eviscerated its own organic vital functions; the ultimate act of cutting the nose off to spite its face. All that remains is a whisper of an arrogant empire, which comforts itself with melancholia and the fossils of domestic symmetry.

People have fled the country in gargantuan migrations, having ruthlessly and obtusely consumed all the land’s resources, leaving behind a ravaged, nutrient-deficient land (figuratively, as well as literally). Those we once called our neighbors, our friends, our family have become precious commodities, scarcely found on the continent. But despite the vastness, the horrible depletion and deforestation of America, one family has stayed behind in their home, unable to move on. By rebelliously inhabiting this skeleton of a country, they must forge themselves a second chance. Ahh, America, where everyone gets to tap dance themselves to the top again in a second act. Maybe.

Seidlinger’s prose is an exercise in brevity, with sentences, phrases, and dialogue coming at you like short jabs to the ribs, to the kidneys, to the jaw . . . advancing the story seamlessly. I liked the construction of the language, as well; building blocks stacked upon building blocks in short passages, making up the chapters.

Given my pessimistic outlook on the empire that once was America, this novel resonated and almost served as a mirror to all of those still waving flags and proclaiming that we are living in the world’s greatest country. I see them as noisemakers rattling sabers, banging on drums, yelling indoctrinated slogans into megaphones, all trapped on a bus that has quickly begun to slip into a deep ravine.

I read this book concurrently with one of literature’s heavyweight dystopian allegories: Jose Saramago’s Seeing. It made a great one-two punch and set me in a beautiful, savage landscape not too far from where we are today.

If you would like a peek into the dreary future of social networking, you should read this book.

We live in a bizarre generation. That is a fact. The awe and confusion that older generations have in the face of our quick-adapting, technologically saturated youth is immeasurable. It is also something well noted; nobody denies the reality that we grow up now immersed in technology or that information is increasing at an insanely exponential rate. Something that is perhaps less seriously mulled over is the effect of this culture on the personalities of today’s youth. The desocializing effect that Facebook and Twitter have, the dichotomy created between online and “IRL,” and the nurturing of the self-absorbed ego that now occupies the center of attention in your own social network are all usually jokes; the kind made about your friend who spends too much time online. But those jokes take on a real value in Michael J. Seidlinger’s new work In Great Company.

In Great Company is a bizarre book. It wavers between being the personal journal of a guy obsessed with his various internet handles  and the battle log of a commander at war, self-indulgent and intent on destroying everyone around him. It is easy to hate the narrator of the text. He, himself, comments on that often. But what he is demonstrating is important and the hatred perhaps comes from a minor degree of self-recognition (and latent self-loathing). Seidlinger has created a character that takes all of the qualities that I suggested earlier (effects of the Internet) and develops them to extreme levels. The disgust provoked by this character, in my case, is really a fear of becoming him.

Early on the narrator professes: “I can only / Quantify moments here, online.” The absorption of the self into an identity on a social network is the only real “event” in the text. Nothing is happening externally. The action is all within the narrator. He speaks to this transformation from human to handle frequently and alludes to an inability to reintegrate into life outside the web with satisfaction: “I am counting / On the unpredictability of the / Digital surf to give me the / Experiences I can no longer get / On my own.” The easily felt repulsion for this character turns into sympathy when you start to look upon him as a social eunuch, removed from the joy of engaging in real-world, fruitful interaction. You can further poke holes in this self-absorbed identity via the errors in the text (mostly, typographical; likely, unintentional), a further reminder that the intimidating voice that speaks is human after all, and like many college-degree bearing students who majored in English or creative writing, he makes typos.

As the text progresses, the confusion between cyber identity and real life intensifies, particularly with the introduction of the “virus.” A trifold interpretation of “virus” as a literal ailment that is contracted and spread, a digital corruption that likewise infects, and as a social disease of cyber obsession (the undoing of the normal functioning personality) makes the narrator’s (and most young readers’) condition very real. The hyper formation of a constructed identity eventually culminates in the loss of identity: “I / Can see my skeletal features, / Looking back at me, when I / Look, I look fearlessly. Go / Ahead, do the same . . . You see the outline of your / Skull?”  This skull-like face graces the cover of the book, a sort of dark, apocalyptic version of that blue, outlined head on Facebook.

The risk of defacement, self-absorption, and losing touch with reality has given way to many of the greatest texts in literature. Noah Cicero related In Great Company to Dostoyevsky’s Notes From the Underground. It also reminds me a bit of Augusto Roa Bastos’ novel I The Supreme. But where these novels demonstrate a certain personality type and condition that are universal, the circumstances surrounding them don’t hit close to home for most contemporary readers. That is why In Great Company is so disconcerting. Its circumstances are those that surround the majority of us in this day and age. Its suggestions are possibilities perhaps too real for people aged thirty or younger.

If you would like a peek into the dreary future of social networking, you should read this book. The warning is that you may come out of it feeling a little “disembodied” or “skeletal.” If you don’t, then you are probably in severe self-denial.