SOURCE: "American Psychos: The Serial Killer in Contemporary Fiction," in Journal of American Culture, Vol. 16, Winter, 1993, pp. 101-12.

[In the following essay, which won the Kathleen Gregory Klein Award in 1992 for best unpublished work of feminist criticism, Caputi remarks on the depiction of serial killers in contemporary literature, focusing on such themes as feminism, ecocide, and the place of serial killers in apocalyptic narratives.]

[The Silence of the Lambs is] no more than escapist entertainment, brilliantly made.

 —Caryn James, New York Times (10 March 1991)

[Jeffrey Dahmer] was a quiet man who worked in a chocolate factory. But at home in apartment 213 a real-life Silence of the Lambs was unfolding.

   —cover blurb, People Weekly (12 August 1991)

Despite the reigning cliché, fiction about serial killers constitutes anything but "escapist entertainment." First of all, these texts frequently mirror actual crimes, suggesting that the border between representation and reality is more porous than conventional...