Synopses & Reviews
Review
"In this post-modern reading, Jeffrey Dahmer is not a page in the history of true crime but a Monster who serves many rhetorical and cultural functions."—Philip Jenkins, Penn State University, author of Using Murder: The Social Construction of Serial Homicide
Review
"Brilliantly compelling. Tithecott challenges us to investigate our simultaneous distancing from and fascination with serial murder."—Maria Tatar, Harvard University, author of Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany
Review
"Tithecott takes aim at the unsettling disparity of attention between murderer and murdered."—Chris Bull, Washington Post
Synopsis
Of Men and Monsters examines the serial killer as an American cultural icon, one that both attracts and repels. Richard Tithecott suggests that the stories we tell and the images we conjure of serial killers—real and fictional—reveal as much about mainstream culture and its values, desires, and anxieties as they do about the killers themselves.
About the Author
Richard Tithecott is an administrative director at the University of Southern California. He is coeditor of the Signet Classic edition of My Secret Life: An Erotic Diary of Victorian London.