Serial killing is no joke.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not expressing my dislike of serial killing. In fact, it is the opposite. The reason it is dangerous is the fact that it is so good.
What could be better than serial killing, especially to a misanthrope like me? Society is populated by stupid, cruel, obnoxious people who are pests to anyone but themselves. If these people drop dead – not all at once, but maybe a few at a time, or even one at a time – it is going to be a much better world. I am sure of this. Aren’t you?
All around us, there is a thick crowd of irritant human beings, who make life infinitely worse for everyone around them. Take any examples you like. Can’t you hear them? That unnecessarily loud horn sounding on the road, some idiot on his motorcycle? Or maybe the guy who’s singing on the megaphones right now, making an ugly mess of a perfectly good song, calling it a ‘remake’? Perhaps the nauseating turdpile of a family that lives in the flat downstairs? Don’t they absolutely deserve to be murdered, the whole lot of them? Murdered – chopped up, hit repeatedly on the head with a hammer, throat opened with a sharp knife, garrotted with a string around their neck – anything. Wouldn’t it absolutely be a relish!
So that is a really sweet fantasy. Really sweet, really satisfying fantasy. Only it will always be just that – a fantasy. You haven’t murdered anyone out here in the real world. In your head – that’s a different matter… but out here, you haven’t done it before. That means you have a serious handicap – your body is not used to that. It hasn’t had the opportunity to build that skill set. It takes some getting used to. Unless you are blessed with psychopathy, you cannot just cut someone’s throat one night just because you feel like it. That needs some learning, without which you will almost surely mess up. – So fantasy it is. The sweetest, dearest fantasy you will have in your life, – maybe second only to the fantasy of killing yourself.
But what if you did have the skill set? Then you could do it. You could kill someone, and if you did it well, you could get away with it.
It is okay up to that point. But then, suppose, you went and killed another person.
That would change it all. Because that second murder, my friend, would turn you from a killer into something much, much more fantastic. That murder would turn you into a serial killer.
It gets tricky from this point on, because now you know not only how to do it, but how to repeat it. You have a new skill now – not just do murder, but to repeat murder. A gift that keeps on giving.
And there’s the risk. With the means at your disposal and a virtually endless supply of deserving victims at your fingertips (they’re all around you), it will be the easiest thing to grow an addiction. You can see that, can’t you? These people run into you as bugs run into window screens – by the dozen, all the time. It’s social service to finish them off. It’s a social service, and it is the most satisfying calming activity you could have to keep your own sanity. So you keep killing. You keep killing, and the world keeps getting better, and while it is debatable whether the efforts of a single man can truly cleanse the world, there is no question that the activity is giving you immense relief, peace and calm. Like a shower before bed at the end of the day. Immense peace. Immense calm.
Now, does that sound like a joke to you?
It’s not a joke. Once you have it, it becomes like a condition of your survival. You live in this day and age, surrounded on all sides by this crop of humanity – the very worst we have had in all of history – you need to try and survive. And once you have the tools of survival in your hands, you cannot let them go. You cannot not use them. You need it. You need to kill.
Serial killing. It’s no joke, friend. It’s a beautiful little dream fantasy that makes me bite my lips in frustration, because it is a fantasy that will never come true.