 In the Age of the Anti-hero, serial killers have become popular protagonists. Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho and Caleb Carr's The Alienist have turned the widespread, mostly even-spirited members of their readership into gluttons for phobia, insomnia, nausea, distrust. You can find these books at Amazon.com: The Alienist and American Psycho | In 1932 the Hungarian Sylvestre Matushka went
on trial for engineering a series of train crashes that killed more than 30 railway
passengers. He stated his profession in these terms: "train wrecker, before that,
businessman." At the time of his arrest police discovered in his possession train
schedules and a map with sites marked out -- plans for future wrecks at the regular
rate of one-a-month. Matushka explained at his trial that he could only achieve sexual
release when witnessing a train crashing and, consequently, made a career of staging
these spectacular planned accidents. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he escaped
confinement. He turned up in 1953, during the Korean War, as the head of a military
unit for blowing up trains. In the recent mad-bomber thriller, Speed, there is a virtual inventory of the public vehicles that put strangers in situations too close for comfort: the stranger-intimacy of the elevator, the bus, the plane, the subway system. The only private space in the film (private spaces scarcely appear in techno-thrillers) is an eerily immaculate and empty home converted into a lethal weapon, exploding when entered. The only sexual intimacy takes place in public, in the wrecked subway car that has burst through the LA streets, as if it were the logical outcome of the demolition, one by one, of the transport networks crisscrossing the city scene. This is demolition as foreplay. These mad bomber stories are atrocity exhibitions. They encapsulate the thrill of witnessing the collision of bodies and machines. These stories are part of a wound culture, a mediatronic culture centered on the torn and opened body, the torn and exposed person, as public spectacle. Serial killing, a public and media spectacle from the start, is one of the flashpoints of our wound culture.
What follows is not so much an essay on serial killing as a mosaic of impressions, hypertextually linked, which together illuminate this murder-by-numbers phenomenon. We invite you start in any of the nine parts listed below and read them in any order, using the crimson internal links to move from one part to its corollary or the navigational tool at the bottom of each page. We look forward to incorporating your comments into these fragments of serial killers: Part 1. The Bloodline. Part 2. Counting Words and Bodies. Part 3. Borrowed Confessions. Part 4. Abnormally Normal. Part 5. Copycat Killers. Part 6. Murder by Numbers . Part 7. Splattercodes. Part 8. Lethal Places. Part 9. Wound Culture. |
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 How about a crash course in the hypertext narrative before you get entangled? In a FEED feauture, "Written on the Web," Carolyn Guyer examines the new literary devices introduced by hypertext which disassembles the narrative's traditional arrangement; the configuration of events and interpretations becomes unique to each reader. Choose your own adventure. |
