The feminist serial killer novel: A subgenre of contemporary global crime fiction

Abstract

With increasing intensity, the twenty-first century has ushered in a new subgenre of the feminist, woman serial killer story. Undoubtedly, and in no small part related to the rise of podcasts, as well as the growing interest in historical crime and true crime, the success of television shows and films, this small (perhaps niche) but wide-ranging subgenre has yet to be fully explored. In this article, I will begin to explore the feminist woman serial killer novel. I will argue that this global subgenre is characterized by narrative and feminist features in relation to murder, motive, and the genre of crime fiction itself. I will base this study on four novels: Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer (2019), Asako Yuzuki’s Butter (2017), Perihan Mağden’s Escape (2012), and Katy Brent’s How to Kill Men and Get Away with It (2023), which have remarkable similarities, despite being written and set in disparate cultures and different languages. The woman serial killer novel can be understood as subversive of the (masculinist) conventions of crime fiction and radical in its representation of serial murder. This article will examine how these novels convey their feminist narratives in response to conventions in previous male-focused serial killer fiction, mobilizing new conventions and aesthetics to establish a feminist perspective.

Serial killer entertainment has been enduringly popular and remains so in the twenty-first century. Writing from an American context, Bernice M. Murphy identifies Robert Bloch’s Psycho (1959) as the inaugural text of the subgenre (2019: 117). Philip L. Simpson observes that the coalescence of the genre likely occurred in earnest between the 1970s and 80s (2000: 14). Sally Munt has noted that in the 1990s, the rise of ego psychology “resulted in the apotheosis of personality theory in the fascination accorded to serial killers, the folk heroes/devils of the 1990s” (1994: 168). Simpson likewise identifies a connection between serial killer fiction and oral folklore (2000: 2) as well as observing that they “plunder from vampire narratives” (2000: 2–6). From the Victorians onwards, the serial killer narrative has been further diversified as it has intersected with true crime biopics, adaptations, and fictionalizations (Murphy, 2019: 123–24). The genre-bending, media-transversing possibilities for the serial killer story make it as ubiquitous as it is hard to define. Nonetheless, Simpson has provided a useful distillation of a particularly successful formula, noting a “controlling Gothic tone, two killers, a dark and troubled law-enforcement outsider in uneasy alliance with a murderer” (2000: 70).

In recent decades, there have been further developments in global serial killer fiction. At first slowly, and now with increasing speed, a burgeoning of feminist adaptations of the serial killer narrative, particularly of, but not exclusively, the novel, has become prominent (Murphy, 2019: 128). Examples of this include successful high-budget television, such as the adaptation of Luke Jennings’ Killing Eve (2018–2024), Bella Mackie’s number 1 Sunday Times bestseller How to Kill Your Family (2021), Asako Yuzuki’s number 1 Sunday Times bestseller Butter (2024), and Netflix’s 2023 international adaptation of Perihan Mağden’s Biz Kimden Kaçıyorduk Anne? (2007). ¹ These speak not only to the momentum of growth and success for this feminist subgenre, but also to its success in recent years (Murphy, 2019: 128), despite the relative lack of critical attention.

This article will argue that this feminist subgenre draws key features from the fictional serial killer narrative, including murder, motive, and readerly identification, while also introducing a feminist critique of its contemporary societies. This new feminist narrative, which appears as insistently destructive, unapologetically violent, and uncomfortably immoral, also confronts the broader masculinist ambivalence historically accompanying crime fiction. The article will build an initial discussion of this feminist woman serial killer novel using four novels: My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018) by Oyinkan Braithwaite; Escape (2007) by Perihan Mağden, How to Kill Men and Get Away with It (2022), by Katy Brent; and Butter (2017) by Asako Yuzuki. My Sister, the Serial Killer is a Nigerian novel set in Lagos, narrated by Korede, whose sister, Ayoola, is a serial killer. The story is about both their everyday lives, jobs, and relationships, as well as the episodic off-screen murders. The novel intersperses its main narrative with Korede’s memories of their abusive father, told in a half-aware, sardonic first-person narration. Escape is a Turkish novel about a mother and daughter, both unnamed, although the daughter’s nickname is Bambi. The novel is a snapshot of memorable events as they move from hotel to hotel, fleeing an unnamed threat. It is revealed that the mother is a serial murderer who kills to deliver justice when she feels wronged. The story is tightly focused on their perspective, with the daughter narrating much of the novel. Some chapters shift focus, however, and are narrated in the first-person by witnesses who recount interactions with mother and daughter, in the wake of the violence trailing them. The British novel How to Kill Men and Get Away with It is one of a group of HarperCollins publications with similar titles and content, such as Eve Kellman’s 2024 book, How to Kill a Guy in Ten Ways. This novel, also told in the first person, follows Kitty, a wealthy heiress and social media influencer in London, who moves between plotting and enacting the murders of violent men while also living an A-list London life. Among this group of novels, How to Kill Men stands out for its tongue-in-cheek tone, which is evident through the title and through running jokes, such as the representation of a serial killer who is also a vegan (Brent, 2022: 29–30). Finally, Butter is a Japanese novel which follows a reporter, Rika, as she investigates and interviews the convicted serial killer Kajii. The novel complicates the idea of serial killing because Kajii is represented as culpable and convicted of her former partners’ murders “despite a lack of concrete evidence for any of the charges against her” (Yuzuki, 2024: 22). As a result of this introductory rebuttal to her “guilt,” the novel explores her crimes through two main tensions: fatness and seduction. It represents contemporary Japanese society as fat-phobic; Kajii, in response, is agential, subverts beauty standards, and is also anti-feminist and coercive. Unlike the other novels, Butter does not have a first-person narrator; however, it employs interviews and dialogue through a third-person omniscient narrator as a means of revealing its truths.

All four novels are, broadly speaking, feminist, even as the conceptualizations of feminism are not necessarily commensurate between the novels. Feminism in this article and in these novels is assumed to be conceived in a plural form and positionally vis-à-vis the societies to which they refer, rather than being identical across the texts. However, the novels overlap in their conception of feminism as that which tests and contests patriarchal structures. In How to Kill Men and My Sister, the Serial Killer, patriarchy is represented through sexually violent fathers, a trope and topic that stands at the extreme of patriarchy, thus allowing the feminist critiques of the novels to explore patriarchy in both the day-to-day and as violent extremism. In Butter and Escape, patriarchal violence is deferred through fathers who are missing or deceased, but it is nonetheless felt in the everyday lives of the characters, particularly through tropes of beauty and desirability, which are critiqued as burdensome, rather than celebrated as an achievement. What makes these novels feminist is, to borrow from Robin Truth Goodman, “detachment and disassociations” that “allow for a changing perspective on the world-as-it-is, the world with its inequality, exploitation, sex slavery, terror and war” (Goodman, 2024: 3). Perhaps more than “detachment and disassociation”, feminist serial killer fiction edges this subgenre closer to feminist abolitionist thinking, which excludes “easy reformist solutions” particularly around crime and punishment (Davis et al., 2022: 21). In these novels, feminism flourishes in the crimes that are unpunished, the guilt that is unatoned, the serial killing that will continue, and the women who survive. As Korede says at the end of My Sister, the Serial Killer, “There will never be another opportunity to confess my sins or another chance to absolve myself of the crimes of the past […] or the future. They disappear with the curling paper, because Ayoola needs me; she needs me more than I need untainted hands” (Braithwaite, 2019: 222–23). The “disarticulation” between crime and punishment recasts violence not only as belonging to the woman who kills but also to the broader patriarchal society (Davis et al., 2022: 23).

The feminist serial killer novel is not only a response to patriarchal society; it is also a formal response to the historical masculinist conventions of the crime fiction subgenres. As a starting point, there is an “assumption of the masculine role of the killer” against a casting of woman-as-victim (Binder, 2021: 75). Ralf Shneider’s work elucidates further how the historical conventions of the genre propagated representations of masculinity by casting not only the “positive middle-class specimen” (2011: 158), but also deprecating masculine “eccentricity, weakness in body, will and rationality” through detectives and criminals, respectively (2011: 161). Suspect masculinity, according to the moral and gendered imaginary of Victorian English literature, was imagined through male perpetrators, while the “best” masculinity was engendered through the detective. This was, not least, established through the world-wide success of Sherlock Holmes. For Joseph A Kestner, Sherlock Holmes stories captivated audiences because of a “male-reader identification with the masculinity presented in Holmes himself” (1996: 76). Returning to the feminist serial killer novel, we can understand it as a reorientation of the political ambitions of the broader genre as well as a reinterpretation of the formal features which helped stabilize its relationship to hegemonic masculinity.

Feminist serial killing: Murder, motive, and affectation

Murder and bodily horror

My Sister, the Serial Killer, Escape, How to Kill Men, and Butter all reveal their murderers and introduce the trope of murder from the beginning of their novels. Murder is central and presented without the distraction of suspense, detection, or revelation. Because these novels are not crime procedural or detective narratives, readerly and narrative attention is focused on the serial killer and her murders. In How to Kill Men, the first sentence reads: “Before all this started, I’d thought that squeezing the life out of someone would be easy. The right amount of pressure on their windpipe and they’d just go limp, like when a kitten suddenly falls asleep” (Brent, 2022: 1). In the opening of My Sister, The Serial Killer, Korede describes her sister Ayoola’s third murder: “She killed him on the first strike, a jab straight to the heart. But then she stabbed him twice more to be sure. He sank to the floor. She could hear her own breathing and nothing else” (Braithwaite, 2018: 8). In Escape, although the murders occur mostly offstage, the novel is filled with murderous innuendo. In an early scene after a disagreement at a hotel, the daughter thinks: “Don’t let them drag you down. Let’s escape right away, before you teach them a lesson” (Mağden, 2007: 33). In Butter, the novel uses the protagonist Rika’s profession as a journalist to investigate and report on the story of Kajii and her murders (Yuzuki, 2024: 22). While Rika scrutinizes Kajii’s murder conviction, Kajii’s own voice reveals her narcissistic cruelty, making her murderousness plausible, despite Rika’s doubts. When Rika asks whether they can be friends, Kajii replies, “‘I don’t want to be friends.’ As she shook her head of glossy hair, a smile floated across Kajii’s face. ‘I don’t need friends. I’m only interested in having worshippers’” (Yuzuki, 2024: 126).

Putting a murder-intensive, killer-focused plotline at the centre of these novels can be read as a formal response to two broader conventions of the genre. Firstly, the move can be read as a reversal of the conventional detective novel. The “classic detective story”, Munt has argued, bears “the presentation of an enigma and the resolution of the enigma through sequence, causality and the application of a positivistic rationality expressed through self-determined consciousness” (Munt, 1994: 189–190). Yet, in the feminist serial killer novel, the murders and the murderers are revealed at the very beginning of the story, while the detective is all but absent.

Franco Moretti has famously read the formal components of the detective story as one that “dispels from the consciousness of the masses the individualist ethic of ‘classic’ bourgeois culture’” (Moretti, 1988: 134). For the feminist serial killer novel, what appears most relevant from Moretti’s “hypothesis” is that “the dominant cultural oppositions of detective fiction are between the individual (in the guise of the criminal) and the social organism (in the guise of the detective)” (Moretti, 1988: 134). “Detective fiction’s object is to return to the beginning” (Moretti, 1988: 137; emphasis in original) and restore the status quo, rather than transform it; the genre works to “reinstate a preceding situation, return to the beginning, prove an alibi; declare oneself elsewhere, extraneous to the place where the disturbing forces broke loose; [to] demonstrate, again, that one has always been the same” (Moretti, 1988: 137; emphasis in original). This tension between killer-centric and detective-centric fiction is already well-noted in Munt’s work, who sees the “heroicization of the serial killer” as related to the “increasingly redundant” detective (1994: 202). Such tensions speak to the socially progressive interests of the feminist serial killer novel, which, quite like its story arc, refuses to “restore order”, as the detective does.

Admittedly, the rise of women detectives in the late twentieth century complicates our understanding of female serial killer novels because the woman detective is a more obvious site on which to read feminism in crime fiction. For the woman detective is the archetypal “thinking woman […] whose extraordinary analytic skills and single-minded determination allows them to solve murders, conspiracies, and other crimes that nobody else can” (Tutter, 2023: 468). If, as Moretti asserts, the male detective is instrumental in returning society to its existing order, the female detective poses a series of questions. As Dorie Klein has asked: “what happens at the intersections of murder mysteries featuring female protagonists, women writing and reading such stories, and real-life crime, including violence against women? Do the works contribute to societal victimization, simply represent it, or do something else entirely?” (1992: 39). These questions suggest a political ambivalence in the woman detective role, one that stems from a successful yet incomplete attempt to overrule the genre’s historical conventions, something that Klein has called “both a fabulous fantasy figure and a reasonable role model” (Klein, 1992: 48)

In comparison, female serial killer novels subvert the gender expectations of the serial killer subgenre in a different way. With some exceptions, the historic foundations of the subgenre rest on the conflated binaric opposition: man/killer and woman/victim. As Simpson explains, this binaric foundation furthermore intersects with a gothic aesthetic of serial killer fiction, one that builds on Bakhtin’s conceptualization of the grotesque: “body genres” are “part of a cultural return to the immediacy of a raw sensuality both absolute and dark” (Simpson, 2000: 12–13). The serial killer subgenre thus interweaves heterosexual sensuality and sexuality with the grotesque, as canonized in fictionalizations of Jack the Ripper’s violence against women and Hannibal Lecter’s cannibalism (Gregoriou, 2011; Simpson, 2000: 35–37). Gregoriou furthermore builds on Jane Caputi’s landmark identification of the “Ripper Mythos” and its establishment of a new “gynocidal archetype” by arguing that such archetypes divert focus away from the women-victims, if they are not also a pathway to a specific sexualization of violence (Gregoriou, 2011: 14).

These women’s serial killer novels build from and against this masculinist serial killer convention. Primarily, they respond to the foundational masculinist binary and knowingly subvert it through strategies of mimetic reversal, which “transpose,” “reinscribe,” “reinterpret,” and sometimes “recover” women from the passive victimhood of the “ripper mythos” (Krishnan, 1996: 9–10). Such strategies of mimetic reversal are not just a reversal of the man/killer, woman/victim dichotomy; instead, they are often complications of it, sometimes parodic and resonant with other types of metafictional play. In Escape, the mother kills a bank manager when she is rude. The daughter steps outside: “I don’t hear the sounds coming from inside the room. I’ve closed the door, quickly. I didn’t see anything, I didn’t hear anything. Just like you wanted” (Mağden, 2012: 99). Here, woman-to-woman violence complicates “male” gothic conventions that victimize and objectify women (Murphy, 2019: 118–19), by not only reinterpreting violence, but also calling attention to the very narration of harming women. The daughter’s refusal to hear or see ultimately draws our attention to the voyeuristic gaze of the serial killer subgenre’s conventions, what Simpson has called the “latently lethal zone of objectification of others” (Simpson, 2000: 40); the daughter, who refuses to witness, disrupts a masculinist voyeuristic gaze that “tantalizes” the assumed male readership of male gothic violence (Caputi, 1987: 90). In How to Kill Men, Kitty asks James for his final words:

I wanted to hear him whimper and beg for his life. Like I said, this is my last hurrah. I take the stocking out of his mouth.

“Please, the kids.”

“I think you know exactly how they feel about you right now.”

“You’re a fucking bitch.”

“I didn’t fuck you though, did I?” Well, that was hardly Hemingway. I shove the stocking back in, bored already, by pinching his nose and forcing him to open his mouth. (Brent, 2022: 357)

Although largely different in tone, How to Kill Men also offers a mimetic reversal to the serial killer binary foundations, not only in the obvious reversal of gendered roles into woman/killer and man/victim. Equally, this scene complicates the representation of murder through banality and boredom, rather than through horror and the excess of emotions associated with gothic fiction (Murphy, 2019: 118). The violent attack and grotesque spectacle of murder are called to attention, and instead the novel renders them unsatisfying, boring, even awkward. The unmistakably parodic tone of Brent’s novel furthermore affirms Munt’s argument that parody in feminist crime fiction “has played an important part in destabilizing dominant myths of gender and sexuality in feminist culture, and […] it is integral to the crime form itself” (Munt, 1994: 206).

The male gothic aesthetics of the serial killer genre are also located in the aesthetics of bodily horror. Simpson observes: “The serial killer, so often associated with biting and eating, serves as the engine that drives our attraction/repulsion towards an elemental existence where one may be free of civilization and its discontents but also possibly killed and eaten” (2000: 5). Butter and My Sister, the Serial Killer take up the trope of feeding-eating parodically, using it to disrupt the grotesque and the horrific in order to explore relations of domesticity and nurture. In My Sister, the Serial Killer, Korede is a good cook, while Ayoola is an enthusiastic eater. The novel plays with masculinist language as it explores this dynamic. For example, her mother says, “Korede, teach your sister now. How will she look after her husband if she cannot cook” (Braithwaite, 2019: 41). Yet the reader and Korede know that she will not be looking after her husband; instead, she keeps murdering her partners. For My Sister, the Serial Killer, eating is tied to nurturing and love, but only parodically so. Korede feeds Ayoola and Tade, but feeding-as-nurturing is replaced with pathological enabling and recast as parasitic behaviour.

In Butter, food is central, both as it is interwoven with Kajii’s murders and as it contributes to Rika’s character development, to the extent that the novel ends with a Thanksgiving feast where food and friendship are fully intertwined. Food serves both as a source of pleasure and as a danger, helping to expose the novel’s central social criticism: namely, the asceticism and regulation of women and their bodies in society. For example, at Kajii’s instigation, Rika begins to experiment with food:

The first thing Rika felt was a strange breeze emanating from the back of her throat. The cold butter first met the roof of her mouth with a chilly sensation, contrasting with the steaming rice in both texture and temperature. The cool butter clashed against her teeth, and she felt its soft texture right down into their roots. Soon enough, just as Kajii had said, the melted butter began to surge through the individual grains of rice. It was a taste that could only be described as golden. A shining golden wave, with an astounding depth of flavour and a faint yet full and rounded aroma, wrapped itself around the rice and washed Rika’s body far away (Yuzuki, 2024: 33)

Here, and in other places, the novel lingers on the bodily pleasure of tasting delicious food, and despite, or even because, this is being recommended by Kajii, who is of dubious moral standing, Rika is able to fully enjoy food. At the same time, the novel explores the repercussions of food, weight gain, and the societal backlash of such a thing: “What the public found most alarming, even more than Kajii’s lack of beauty, was the fact that she was not thin. Women appeared to find this aspect of the case profoundly disturbing, while in men it elicited an extraordinary display of hatred and vitriol” (Yuzuki, 2024: 23). Biting and eating in Simpson’s formulation of the serial killer subgenre is abject, but Rika’s relationship to food is restorative and even joyous. By representing both the pleasure and social anxiety around food and weight, Butter alters the gothic formula of bodily horror, using food and weight to locate “vitriol” not with the murderer but in the society at large.

Motive

While there is an abundance of scholarship on the motivation of “real” people who serially kill, the motive for becoming a serial murderer in fiction has been less central to the plot and therefore to their critical reception. As Simpson observes with regard to the influence of Thomas Harris’s successful serial killer formula, the “evil genius” of the serial killer requires equally intelligent opponents, such as profilers (Simpson, 2000: 70–73). As a result, the narrative centres the profiler-serial killer dynamic and deemphasizes the “why” of motivation, representing the killer as “evil and unknowable” (Simpson, 2000: 72). This is not true, however, of female serial killer narratives. As Nicole Kenley has argued, crime fiction can reframe “the systemic motives for women who commit murder” (2022: 104), emphasizing social problems as a motivation for crime. Tua Sandman, who has worked on representations of women offenders in Swedish media, has identified an opposite trend where female offenders are represented within a limited discourse of motives, reduced to singular categories of “sad”, “mad” or “bad”, rather than considering systemic and structural victimization. She furthermore argues that the restrictive discourse on women offenders shows that “previous accounts seem to put an emphasis on ‘either/or’; the categories of bad and mad/sad are frequently portrayed as distinct and separate categories” (2022: 244). Kenley and Sandman demonstrate that there is a spectrum for interpreting motive, where, on one side, motive is a story of systemic oppression, and on the other, a singular account of personal and personality weakness. Both scholars, however, agree that the motive for women killer narratives highlights their victimization in society at large and is necessary for understanding the woman offender’s story, quite unlike the “evil genius” archetype of the male serial killer narrative.

Motive is key to understanding the feminist mode of representation of woman serial killer narratives. A good example of this is the feminist adaptation of Luke Jennings’ Killing Eve. The hit BBC Three and BBC America television show, featuring big-name actors Sandra Oh and Jodie Comer, and writers such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge, reinterprets the story in specifically feminist ways. Audrey Jane Black explains the very intentional decisions to render the series in feminist and queer ways. One such decision was de-emphasizing or altogether removing the novel’s “motivations” for Villanelle’s murderous streak (2022: 808). For Jenning’s novels, Oxana’s original vulnerability and victimization are implied as a motive for her later sociopathic and violent behaviour:

When you were ten your father was seconded again, this time to Dagestan. You returned to the Sakharov orphanage where, after three months, you were discovered setting fire to the dormitory block, and transferred to the psychiatric unit of Municipal Hospital Number 4 in Perm. Against the advice of your therapist, who had diagnosed you as suffering from a sociopathic personality disorder, you were returned home to your father. […]

You did, however, form an attachment to your French teacher, a Miss Leonova, and become extremely agitated when you learned that she had been subjected to a serious sexual assault while waiting for a bus late at night. Her supposed assailant was arrested but later released for lack of evidence. Six weeks later he was discovered in woodland near the Mulyanka river, incoherent with shock and blood loss. He had been castrated with a knife. (Jennings, 2017: 11)

The novel explores the themes of emotional and familial neglect as an “impossibly caricatured backstory” (Black, 2022: 808). Where Sandman sees “sad”, “mad” and “bad” as exclusive categories for understanding women’s crime, Jenning’s novel layers together these categories of systemic failure and oppression: Oxana is sad (loss of mother, separation from father); bad (setting fire to dormitory and other incidents) and mad (both mad as in a diagnosed sociopath and mad as in vengeful, particularly against men). The exponentially compounded motivation thus explains, maybe even justifies, Villanelle’s sociopathic, joyful, murderous character, as if any lesser configuration could not possibly explain a killer woman. Between the novels and the television adaptation, then, motive, while formally necessary for reasons of compelling and believable characterization, has the effect of mitigating Villanelle’s agency and entrapping her within sad-bad-mad discourses. The feminist TV adaptation, however, untethers the character from such victimhood, and reorients the text towards the “recognition and valorization of female agency and subjectivity” although, as Tiina Mäntymäki notes, “when doing so through murdering, an obvious ethical problem arises” (2013: 442).

The feminist, woman serial killer novel subgenre enhances the themes of female agency and subjectivity, similar to the television adaptation of Killing Eve, by omitting fully articulated or knowable motivations for its murderers. In How to Kill Men, Kitty, for example, is supposedly protecting women from predators, but the novel shows us from its first chapter just how much she enjoys it: “I ease his eyelids down over his eyes and sit back to admire my work. This is my favourite part” (Brent, 2022: 3). This is also true of Ayoola, whose backstory of an abusive father is less important than her premeditated preparation for murder: “Ayoola inherited the knife from [father] (and by “inherited” I mean she took it from his possessions before his body was cold in the ground)” (Braithwaite, 2018: 37). In Butter, motive is actually a significant component of the plot as Rika attempts to understand Kajii’s in order to prepare for her interview. Yet, attempts to find a single influential motive are ultimately indeterminate. Rika finally relinquishes Kajii but only after taking the lessons of agency and subjectivity that Kajii inspires. In Escape, the motive for the mother and daughter fleeing and murdering is central to the narrative because it is what keeps the mother and daughter on the move, and yet the daughter never knows the reason for their constant fleeing: “What made Mother so desperate? What happened to her? What happened to her mother? My grandmother?” (Mağden, 2012: 4). For all the novels, the partial obfuscation of motive complicates broader social and ethical interrogations and emphasizes characterizations of women’s agency, as they are, sometimes, just enjoying themselves.

Women’s agency is thus a central theme for the subgenre. It is a thematic priority due to the way the novels portray serial killing. Sometimes murders have an immediate rationale, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes, there is partial attention rendered to the discourses of “sad”, “mad” or “bad”, and sometimes it is a murder of convenience or coincidence. This inconsistency is further foregrounded by the “serial” action of killing; the women do not just kill once, but over and over again, explicitly showing the contradictory ambitions, urges and motives from one murder to another. Critical literature on women and crime fiction likewise represents this inconsistency. For Berit Åström, “the genesis of the serial killer is located, not in any systemic failure of society […] that is, the serial killer’s evil stems from a discrete, individual situation, often an overprotective and/or nagging mother, and not from wider social problems” (2013: 98). For Kenley, women’s fictional crimes shed light on “endemic challenges posed by gender inequality and patriarchal systems” (2022: 100). The feminist serial killer novel does not attempt to resolve such inconsistencies. Unlike the “evil genius” of the man serial killer subgenre, which is often rendered as a battle between good and evil, absolute triumph or loss, here, in this subgenre, the reader’s attention is called to the inconsistencies of positionality between victim and perpetrator, sometimes for parodic reasons, sometimes for moral ones. Inconsistency in motive helps direct the resolution of this subgenre, one in which the killer avoids (further) punishment and mostly promises to continue killing. Unlike the “evil genius” that has transgressed and needs to be punished, the woman serial killer evades punishment. The result is a reading experience which is less about “evil” and more about genius.

Readerly expectation, pleasure, and suspicion

Feminist Woman Serial Killer fiction thrives on moral, political, and literary ambivalence, all distinct yet intertwined aspects of the readerly experience of crime fiction. As Munt has noted of other, earlier, feminist crime fiction: “The rejection of a Manichean morality disturbs the expectations and pleasures of the reader, who is made more and more uncomfortable” (Munt 1994 18). In fact, as Munt further elaborates, “The issue of intention and interpretation” when identifying a feminist point-of-view in crime fiction, focuses the debate on to readership” (Munt, 1994: 20). Munt also personally identifies an “ambivalence towards” some authors’ feminist representations (Munt, 1994: 20). Munt’s limited ambivalence can be considered in relation to W.H. Auden’s famous introduction of crime fiction:

For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol. The symptoms of this are: Firstly, the intensity of the craving — if I have any work to do, I must be careful not to get hold of a detective story for, once I begin, I cannot work or sleep till I have finished it. Secondly, its specificity — the story must conform to certain formulas […] And thirdly, its immediacy. I forget the story as soon as I have finished it, and have no wish to read it again. (1956: 301)

Auden’s famous tongue-and-cheek description of both his enthusiasm for and “addiction” to crime fiction resonates with other critical receptions, those which acknowledge the pleasure of reading crime fiction as well as hold a suspicion that it is something that is “bad for you.” David Stewart’s work on reading pleasure argues that this suspicion emerges because of the bodily responses we have in reading crime fiction, among other genres: “Pornography, sentimentality, horror, sensationalism: all owe their low cultural esteem to the fact that they provoke compulsive, physical responses” (Stewart, 1997: 677). Certainly, this suspicion is further compounded by scholarly wariness of the value of “low cultural” genres. Scholars Masschelein and de Geest sum it up well, while building upon Auden’s work: “Hence, the detective novel is a guilty pleasure that cannot be considered art due to its formulaic nature. However, as an “anti-literary” genre, it stands in dialectical relation to art, in that it shows negatively what literature is” (2017: 98).

The woman serial killer novel is a knowing and self-reflexive subgenre that fully embraces its “low culture” and bodily-affective characteristics. Even in seemingly mundane descriptions, the body, the woman’s body, features in ways that both emphasize the bodily, while also disrupting pleasure-seeking or voyeuristic gazes. For example, in My Sister, the Serial Killer, the chapter “Heat” begins:

The heat is oppressive, and so we find ourselves conserving our energy by restricting our movements. Ayoola is draped across my bed in her pink lace bra and black lace thong. She is incapable of practical underwear. Her leg is dangling off one end, her arm dangling off the other. Hers is the body of a music video vixen, a scarlet woman, a succubus. It belies her angelic face. She sighs occasionally to let me know she is alive.

[…]

Our house girl ambles in carrying a fan and places it facing Ayoola, as though she is blind to the sweat rolling down my face. (Braithwaite, 2019: 19)

This passage addresses the reader’s expectations by parodying the voyeuristic gaze. It approaches and disrupts the expectations of the “low culture” genres by describing Ayoola’s semi-naked, sexualized body and confronting them through Korede. Korede’s sisterly disapproval, her own physical discomfort and resentment at being overlooked show how inappropriate the voyeuristic gaze on the “music video vixen” is. Likewise, the reference to “being alive” alludes to the readerly expectations of the woman/victim, parodically casting them off. This is even more impactful because we know Ayoola is the novel’s killer and has seemingly nothing to fear about being murdered. In Butter, the sexualized voyeuristic gaze is disrupted by queering Rika’s body as an object of desire for other women. In Escape, the novel represents the daughter’s beauty as a liability, and in How to Kill Men, sexualization is pathologized through the backstories of rape and incest. Although the voyeuristic gaze is not the only feature of crime fiction which might be “addictive” and “suspicious”, the feminist serial killer novel purposefully disrupts it, even as it does not necessarily obfuscate the bodily gore of murder. Such disruption of viewing the woman’s body in sexualized ways has helped develop the subgenre’s feminisms.

Socio-politics and morality of feminist serial killer fiction

The socio-politics of feminist serial killer fiction are not predetermined in any formal sense. Åström et al. write, “The retrograde aspects of crime fiction are visible in the resolutions of the stories and in the narratives’ alignment with male authorities and institutions of law and order, and in particular in the genre’s predilection for female victims, and extreme and brutal violence against women” (2013: 3). But, on the other hand, crime fictions — especially those which explore sexual and gender-based violence — have the potential to reconsider “how the relationship between ‘victims’ and ‘perpetrators’ is undergoing a complex revision” (Åström et al., 2013: 3). It is not surprising, given the malleability of the genre of crime fiction, that there is also potential for politically progressive gender-focused crime fiction, as much as voyeuristic and masculinist versions. As Messent points out, it is built into the form itself, “its ideological tensions, its ability to challenge established conventions and norms and to ask questions about the larger condition of the society, its values and systems of authority” (Messent, 2013: 13). In this way, while the form lends itself to socio-political critique, its ideological positionality, particularly in the realm of gender-focused politics, is not predetermined.

The woman serial killer does not respond to gendered socio-political constraints with simple binaries such as “good woman” and “bad man”; rather, these novels enhance the moral and ethical complexities of their characters. In How to Kill Men, for example, the first witnessed murder comes when Kitty is being attacked: “He could rape me. He could strangle me. He could throw my weak female body into the water and watch on the news as I’m eventually dredged up. Another woman killed because she didn’t do what a man wanted. Not me. Not tonight” (Brent, 2022: 23). And yet, Kitty is hardly innocent when she accidentally kills her friend’s short-term boyfriend for ghosting her. Ayoola equally crosses the novel’s line of acceptability when she pursues Tade, with whom her sister is in love. The mother in Escape spirals at the end of the novel, with escalating brutality — robbing and killing: “‘The garbage bag’s full of cash and jewellery Bambi,’ Mother says, brokenly. ‘It’ll last you for years. It’s the first time I had to do it for money. It was always to protect us, you and me. It was horrible! Unbearable!’” (Mağden, 2007: 195–96). And Kajji is characterized, on the one hand, as a trailblazer, throwing off the heteronormative and fatphobic demands of society. She explains to Rika that Reiko had come to see her out of concern because: “You’d put on weight. She said she was hopelessly worried about you. You’d left the world of reason behind. That sickened me to hear. Is the woman daft, or what? Being that upset about what happens to someone else’s body” (Yuzuki, 2024: 257). And, on the other hand, the novel reveals that Kajii is manipulative and coercive, and towards the end of the novel, dangerous.

This morally blended protagonist deliberately complicates certain crime fiction archetypes. In Binder’s particularly useful summary of the female perpetrator in crime fiction, the “original” template is that of the femme fatale. Alongside her, “the figure of the victim-avenger” emerges and “apart from the types of femme fatale and the victim-avenger, the female perpetrator figure in crime fiction has attracted little critical attention” (Binder, 2021: 76–77). Women perpetrators can furthermore be powerful figures of critique regarding the socio-political context. Binder argues:

This is a resistant gender performance, for it not only runs counter to socially constructed norms of femininity, but expands the scope of female agency. Because assertions of power have long been connected to assertions of masculinity, performing the male role of the killer is a way in which these female figures can move to a place of power. By doing so, they not only contest the dominant power, but expose gender norms as constructs and potentially transform the way in which readers of crime fiction view women. (Binder, 2020: 75–76)

In the serial killer subgenre, the serial killers do not reverse the gender-based violence and oppression of contemporary society through their representation of women killing. While Binder sees killing as a “resistant gender performance”, this subgenre resolutely presents gender-based violence and oppression as a part of its “normal” society, outside of the control of the women serial killers. The serial killer women are exceptional for their killings; the violence perpetrated by society and found in daily life and through the fabric of the characters’ lives is “normal”. For example, Escape ends with the death of the mother, as she leads the police away from her daughter. This final chapter is narrated by an unnamed soldier. The final lines read:

That’s what I’ll never forget. That scene with him booting her in the head. I can’t help thinking how fucked up things are. It really is a fucked-up world we live in, no doubt about that.

There’s a woman, a mother, lying there on the ground. Dead. Why kick her in the head? Why the hatred? And in whose name? And why? (Mağden, 2007: 208)

Escape uses its final moments to make absolutely clear the entrenchment of misogyny running through its depiction of contemporary society. It does so by finally drawing attention to the misogyny of society, getting the reader to look back at the violence of the story in a different light. As a result, we see the violent mother as part of a broader relation of violence, and, as we confirm with the daughter, a relation of violence that will continue. The other novels have similar representations of their contemporary societies. In Butter, the back-and-forth about whether Kajii is a murderer is resolved by her increasingly coercive and intrusive behaviour and attention, of which Rika finds herself the object. Yet, the novel uses Kajii merely as an instrument to divine and explore society’s broader problems. This is evident in the novel’s lengthy resolution, where Rika builds her life with her friends and food, and Kajii all but disappears from the story. While Butter and Escape have very different resolutions, both very clearly show that violence is not contained within the woman serial killer alone; instead, violence is the fabric of our “normal” contemporary societies, which the woman serial killer is very much a product of and response to.

While Binder’s “resistant gender performance” is certainly an influence on the subgenre, particularly as the femme fatale remains a relevant archetype to read into the works, Kenley’s work on “system focused” feminist crime fiction has broad implications for the feminist woman serial killer subgenre. System focused novels examine “the crimes that arise from broader societal, systemic inequalities that disproportionately disadvantage and injure women” (2022: 100). Kenley’s categorization of these works overlaps largely with the “woman serial killer” subgenre, as both recognize an entrenched feminist gaze which interrogate “broader patriarchal systems” (Kenley, 2022: 100). The feminist serial killer is indeed system focused. It refuses to understand serial killers as anomalous to society. It encapsulates both the notion of resistant gender practice and mimetic reversal, as well as an interest in social change.

The feminist serial killer subgenre is, however, best characterized by its morally ambiguous imaginary, one that serves the storyline of serial murder. It uses murder not as a signification, but to show us how violent our “normal” world is, engendered not despite, but because of, its moral ambiguity. Butter is a social commentary on work-focused Japanese society; Escape is a critique of Turkish state-sponsored patriarchy; My Sister, the Serial Killer is, according to Kenley, a critique of beauty-obsessed Lagosian society (Kenley, 2022: 110); and How to Kill Men is a critique of London’s A-list social-media-influenced lifestyle. None of these novels need murder to make their critiques, but the addition of murder to all of them fundamentally estranges their representations of society at large, so the point made is that society and serial killing are part of the same spectrum: a recognizable contemporary society with identifiable, everyday socio-political struggles which reach, or perhaps have always been, of murderous proportion. The episodic, sometimes morally ambiguous yet often humorous and joyous feminist serial killer novel breaks conventions not only of what crime fiction looks like but also of how we should understand our societies.