Daniel Lukes
“The Last Serial Killer”
The location is a bus station, a hospital entrance, or some other public area where people come and go, and where two guys, two random white guys, can pass relatively unnoticed. In the police station library they enter unobserved, and mill about, looking at the books. Edward appears in the door, watching a nurse walk by. Outside the station they linger: there is a homeless guy with a beard and a red jacket, he is brandishing a hammer in his hand. He is clenching his jaw, and looks a little unhinged. Edward makes a show of mimicking his facial expression, which the guy notices and engages with, holding the hammer more forcefully. Then they go upstairs, and what they are sitting in is clearly a church, which then morphs into a moving compartment of some kind, a train carriage or bus. They are heading to the church proper.
Something is lost in translation from the dream state.
The two men are brothers: one is played by Edward Norton, the other by Ben Foster. One is the last serial killer, the other is the foil.
Edward’s sermon is about how in the surveillance state it is harder to be a serial killer: you need resources, you need to be mega-rich. Or you need to have access to the very poor, the vulnerable, those who will go unmissed, and kill them in places undetected by CCTV and GPS, etc. There’s a reason the end of the golden age of serial killers coincided with the rise of surveillance tech: but now we have better and cleaner ways to kill.
You can become a cop, and kill people with immunity, for sport. There’s a conservative lawyer on Twitter who chronicles this stuff in meticulous detail. You can join the army, and go overseas and drop bombs on brown people, and guide drones after them, chasing them from car to car until you kill them entirely, or even checking in at their home and killing the whole family at dinner, or at a wedding, that’s always a good one. You can always go the spree shooter route, and go out with a bang and a manifesto.
Ultimately, though, if you want to kill lots and lots of people (and stay alive), your best option is to get into politics, where as a politician you can simply order people to be murdered, many many people killed, bombed by planes or drones, adults and children burned with white phosphorus or shot to death in military raids, dead in cages, or caught on barbed-wire fences or floating saws in the river at the border. Who knew that it’d be practically compulsory to kill and massacre all those people if you want to be a “lawmaker”? The public good? Forget about it. These are the days of Mandatory Genocide and the Necrocapitalist-Flavored Water.
In the obligatory PowerPoint presentation, our preacher shows murderabilia art, with a special focus on the works of John Wayne Gacy, and his creepy alter-ego Pogo the Clown, the soundtrack playing soft-ambient renditions of songs by Louisiana “sludge” band Acid Bath. What is the morality of serial killer art? Is it cathartic and socially useful, or do we use it to justify our own crooked timber? Did you know that excessive socio-cultural preoccupation with serial killers has inhibited research into sexual murders involving only one victim, which are the vast majority of the cases? Obsessing over serial killers literally kills.
The last slides are reserved for a series of portraits of Genocide Joe: in his Dark Brandon guise, eyes gleaming red à la Homelander; and finally as Joe the Sniper, where he manages to contemporaneously lick an ice cream cone and assassinate tens of thousands of children and adults in one fail swoop. There’s no contest, really: Joe gets the gold medal in this round.
Daniel Lukes is writer and editor based in Montreal, and his most recent book is Black Metal Rainbows (PM Press, 2023). His short stories have been published by Moonpark Review, Misery Tourism, Expat Press, and Alien Buddha Press. He is currently writing a book on incel cultures. On Twitter, which he (and everyone else) still calls Twitter, he can be found at @danielukes
