Serial Killer Days

David Prill

A couple of years back a rave review of this book circulated in the Barn (it did sound good) and I think the book itself was circulated among a few of the North American barners. Thank goodness I got hold of a cheap second-hand copy over here and didn't presume upon a fellow Barner to send it to me across the pond. It wouldn't have been worth the postage.

It did sound so very good. An average prosperous Middle American town has experienced an annual serial killing for as long as anyone can remember. By turning the event into an excuse for a ghoulish pageant the town brings in the tourist dollars and has a darn good party every year. Nicely handled it could have been brilliant.

In the end I'm not sure what it's supposed to be. Maybe it's supposed to be a black comedy but there aren't any jokes and it's much too fluffy to be black. Maybe it's supposed to be a thriller but there's no tension and no twist. Maybe it's supposed to be a brilliant satire on the cheeriness and entrepreneurial spirit of the small American town but if it's a satire it falls soggily flat at every turn. If it was meant to be a satire it was crying out for, I don't know, a figure from out of town to point out the ghoulishness of it all, a foil for the affectedly screwball townspeople, a straight man to the lame comedy. Something, anything for the comedy to work against.

You read about how it is to work in publishing - how the unsolicited manuscripts are all so very bad and how there so very very many of them. Reading Serial Killer Days I wondered if some kind of novelistic switching-at-birth had occurred here and if whether there wasn't, in someone's waste-paper bin in New York, a crisply written, funny, engaging satire of middle America. And that maybe David Prill's novel got published instead.