SOURCE: "Consuming Cannibals: Psychopathic Killers as Archetypes and Cultural Icons," in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 18, Spring, 1995, pp. 87-96.

[In the essay below, Grixti suggests why American society is consumed with serial killers and argues that popular culture's depictions of such criminals reveals underlying needs and concerns of American society.]

There is no longer any such thing as fiction or nonfiction, there is only narrative.

—E.L. Doctorow (qtd. in [Shelley Fisher] Fishkin

[From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America, 1985])

Early in 1992, a series of newspaper articles announced that Jeffrey Dahmer had been made the "main hero" of a comic book biography. A Milwaukee court of law had recently found Dahmer guilty of a string of violent murders involving rape, dismemberment, and cannibalism. One article (headlined "Dahmer Now a Comic Book Hero" [by Yaroslau Trofimou in The Weekend Australian (May 1992)]) reported that the book contained...