Fresh Blood in Fall Waters: Our Dark Fascination with Serial Murder
by Dean Patrick
“The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?”
— Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial
I’m done whispering. October’s here, the air turning feral, the night stretching out like a hunting ground. I’m stepping back into the dark with an upcoming beast of a novel, Mister Boogie. Rex Brody is coming with his alter ego, his super id, Mister Boogie, a predator with costume and code, a killer grown from the broken archways of a stolen and abandoned childhood. My re-emergence, and as you’d expect, coming at your emotions without mercy, without consequence, dragging you straight to the place where fascination and fear coil together like the white lacey clouds blown through a rusted meth pipe.
Because serial murder isn’t a sideshow. It’s not spectacle for the evening news. It’s a mirror. And for over a century, we’ve stared into it, transfixed, even as it reflects the ugliest face of humanity back at us.
Blood Atonement
A single murder horrifies. Repetition of it transforms horror into ritual. Jack the Ripper carved more than women; he carved a legend in the alleys of Whitechapel and wrote letters to the press to make sure the world was watching. H. H. Holmes turned his Chicago hotel into a labyrinth designed for killing, a perpetual nightmare with no alarm clock. Carl Panzram roamed the country spilling confessions like gasoline, bragging about slaughter with the pride of an artist signing his canvas.
These aren’t just crimes; they’re performances that linger, echo, mutate. Each new act tells us this: the monster is never gone; it’s perfecting its art. That’s the grotesque magnetism of serial murder, never one and done. It builds, escalates, refines. And with each killing, the curious audience, the community, the press, the world, becomes unwilling participants in blood theater.
Forgotten Predators
Everyone knows Bundy, Dahmer, BTK. They’re more brands than names, murder-as-pop-culture. But the deeper horror lives in the ones we don’t remember so easily. The Blackout Ripper, prowling through a London already torn apart by bombs, turned the dark into his weapon. Jane Toppan, the Victorian nurse who poisoned her patients while humming lullabies, proved that “angel of mercy” can be a death sentence. Robert Hansen flew women into the Alaskan wilderness, releasing them to be hunted like game (Be sure to check out 2013’s The Frozen Ground starring Nick Cage and John Cusack in a terrifying performance).
Monsters aren’t born, they’re built, one secret at a time, one betrayal at a time, until the mental wire snaps and there’s no turning back. That is what terrifies us most: not that they exist, but that anyone could become one.
Then there’s Albert Fish, the “Gray Man,” who wrote letters to grieving families detailing the taste of their children’s flesh. Forgotten, buried in dusty archives, but every one of them left shockwaves that bent cities and scarred generations. They’re the ones that whisper beneath our cultural floorboards, the names that don’t make serial-killer merch or streaming documentaries, but whose horror still leaks upward, feeding every new story we tell.
Slow-Burn Terror
Serial murder terrifies because it lingers. One killing shocks; a series hypnotizes. It’s the pause between murders that does the real damage: the waiting, the uncertainty, the knowledge that someone out there has already chosen their next victim but hasn’t yet moved. That’s when fear metastasizes. Communities eat themselves alive in paranoia. Neighbors stop trusting neighbors. Every shadow, every stranger, becomes a rehearsal for attack.
That’s why the headlines keep the vice tight. That’s why Jack the Ripper tours still sell out in Whitechapel, why people still speak BTK’s name decades after his first strike. Serial murder is a storm that never clears. It’s psychological horror in the rawest form: you are the prey who always knows the predator is starving.
The Safer Crime Scene…Or Is It?
We gorge ourselves on fictional serial killers because they allow us to touch that terror without bleeding from it. Dexter gives us a predator who kills with a code, letting us cheer for something we’d otherwise fear. Hannibal Lecter seduces us with refinement, turning cannibalism into a dinner party we can’t turn down. Patrick Bateman shows us the blank face of greed and emptiness, a yuppie apocalypse in human form.
Fiction elevates killers to archetype, polishing the chaos of real murder into something mythic. It lets us step to the crime scene’s edge without ever seeing the inside of a body bag. Horror thrives in that tension through the sordid and the stylized, the ugly and the beautiful, tangled together in a single human face.
Enter Mister Boogie…
Rex Brody will step out of the shadows in full glory. My readers were introduced to him in my last novel, The Harlot and the Beast, the split-personality narcissist fully trained as a professional killer as well as a software engineer. In Mister Boogie, Rex Brody is fully unleashed in a novel created to hunt down what scares you most.
He’s not a vigilante who wraps his victims in plastic sheeting. He’s no cartoon of madness with wild eyes and a chainsaw. He’s sophisticated, eloquent, delivering precision brutality to those who have “always deserved it.”
In Mister Boogie, Rex Brody will shift gears from curiosity to obsession, from obsession to bloodlust. Soon, you’ll descent with him into Houston’s, New York’s, and Salt Lake City’s underbelly and into The Serpent’s Veil, a club where witches chant like Macbeth’s chorus and visions cut reality open like a fine straight razor. I’ll say no more for now…
Why We Can’t Look Away
We keep coming back to these stories because they let us flirt with the abyss. They are safe rehearsals for terror, ways to test our fragility without shattering it. Serial killers embody the nightmare that the social contract can break at any moment, that someone could be hunting you right now, and you wouldn’t know it until the knife slits across your bloody throat.
And sometimes…as with Rex Brody…they remind us that the line between predator and prey isn’t carved in stone. It can be crossed. Monsters aren’t born, they’re built, one secret at a time, one betrayal at a time, until the mental wire snaps and there’s no turning back. That is what terrifies us most: not that they exist, but that anyone could become one.
Thank you for joining my re-entry. My blood offering for the months ahead to a new year. A new book, a new season of blogs, no more whispers, no more comfort. I’m here to drag you closer to the mirror and force you to look deep into your own eyes until you’re forced to look away.
From Jack the Ripper’s foggy alleys to Holmes’ murder castle, from forgotten poisoners to the neon-soaked hunting grounds of Mister Boogie, the fascination endures because the fear endures. Because deep down, we want it to.
Enjoy, my fine readers.
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