ABSTRACT

At this point, I want to shift the focus to what might be called the popular psychology of the serial killer. I mean “popular psychology” in two senses. First, the popular understanding of the serial killer that circulates not merely in fiction, film, and the mass media but also in “official” accounts of the serial killer (and, as we have seen, even for the profilers, “our antecedents do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact” 1 ). And second, the uncanny manner in which the interior states of the serial killer himself seem nothing but the clichés du jour that make up a pop-psychology (the hypertypicality by which the serial killer melts into place). I want initially to consider this popular psychology by way of a piece of pulp fiction that directly engages it: Jim Thompson's remarkable prototype novel of compulsive killing, The Killer Inside Me (1952). I want then to look at, more generally, the logic of pulp fiction— a mass-produced genre-fiction premised not merely on the mass fascination with representations of murder but also in which clichés and killing, dead words and dead bodies, seem to feed on each other. And I want to trace, finally, how that logic seems to enter into, or to evacuate, the “inside” experience of the serial killer.