Synopses & Reviews
Jimmy Blackburn grows up in the Midwest believing the things that adults tell him. He questions his teachers and they lie to him. He questions his parents and his father beats him. He questions the world and it hurts him.
And so Jimmy Blackburn becomes a killer.
In this novel we meet many of Blackburn's twenty-one victims. They include law enforcers, writers, adulterers, auto mechanics, and other liars.
This is an exceptional novel, at once riotously funny and searingly potent: a vision of America through the eyes of the central bogeyman of our culture.
Review
"A bracing antidote to the pop sociologies of mass murder it so deftly skewers. The boldly abusive mixture of hilarity, despair, and cartoon eschatology recalls Flannery O'Connor and
Miss Lonelyhearts." --
Kirkus Reviews"A profoundly unsettling book. . .Its sense of despair and bitter satire will recall Miss Lonelyhearts, its voice brings to mind Jim Thompson's chatty amiable monsters...By turns hilarious, heartrending, violent and curiously tender, it is like no book you've read before." --James Sallis, The Washington Post Book World
"A horror novel of contemporary American culture that takes an unexpected angle of attack and goes on beyond Thomas Harris. . .Blackburn's a spellbinder." --Locus
Review
"An absolutely mesmerizing novel that will leave you stunned and conflicted.
Blackburn is an emotionally challenging read, so consider yourself warned. A masterpiece."--Augusten Burroughs
"By turns hilarious, heartrending, violent, and tender, it is like no book you've read before. A profoundly unsettling book."--The Washington Post Book World
Synopsis
Blackburn is a serial killer. But, like the rest of us, he confronts the same hypocrisies and frustrations of the world and, unable to help himself, or at the mercy of circumstance, he crosses a dangerous threshold--and he kills. In this novel, we meet many of his twenty-one victims: law enforcers, writers, adulterers, auto mechanics, and other liars. And each crime reveals another side of his psyche . . . and his disturbing rationale for murder.
About the Author
Bradley Denton was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1958. He is the author of five novels and two short story collections. He lives on the outskirts of Austin, Texas.