Lucy Corin's Everyday Psychokillers

Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls is a novel without a single psychokiller in it. The psychokiller is always serialized already in this novel; he's a composite of all the other killers. Especially remarkable are extended set pieces in which contradictory and overlapping psychokiller narratives are spun out: "The Story of Henry Lee Lucas and How It Was for Him and Ottis Toole" is one, another is the narrator meditating on just what a psychokiller is and meanwhile mutating and garbling the names: "It could have been anyone, Elton Crude or Lubie Geter, Delton Creder or Lubie Gude." That it could have been anyone, the focus on the ordinariness of psychokillers, is what makes this novel so brilliant.

I'm overstating it when I say it's "a novel without a single psychokiller in it;" in fact, a lot of individual names  and stories of psychokillers are in the novel, but the killers are treated in their everydayness: their seriality, their indistinctness, their penumbral or media-aural ghostliness. Except for the story of a girl who is given a ride by Ted Bundy and rejected for not conforming to type (his type), there aren't really any narratives of the encounter of a girl with a killer--because that is both the extraordinary encounter (most women survive girlhood without being abducted by a serial killer) and the ordinary encounter (it's a story we've heard over and over, the abducted girl, who is rescued or not). The novel is about growing up amid the everyday fact of psychokillers, at a time (late seventies/eighties) when their image was intensely hyped by the media.

In the novel, the desire that's constructed for suburban girls -- the desire to be seen adored desired singularized-as-a-beautiful-girl-- is the desire that both de-individuates them (serializes them) and puts them in danger.

This is the novel of suburbs I've been waiting for. It's very attentive to what suburbs are, materially and psychically, or what my suburbs were. Without any of the inherited tropes from John Cheever or or Ward Cleaver or the rest of the sterotypes that have nothing to do with this class of suburb, with this era of suburb. (The novel arrived with the other books I'd ordered, and which make excellent accompaniments to it: Delores Hayden's Building the Suburbs and also her A Field Guide to Sprawl.)

Like the narrator of Everyday Psychokillers, I also went to junior high and high school in Florida in the 70's and early eighties. I went to a concrete cinder-block junior high with open breezeways, as in the novel; it looked like a low-slung and sprawly motel. It was next to an orange grove, and there were two ninth-grade students, brothers, who were infamous for taking girls to the orange grove and raping them. It could have been true, or not. But that specific conjuncture--cinder blocks, danger, orange groves, violence, Florida suburbs, and also the weird way Florida follows you, keeps turning up in the most evil narratives like Ted Bundy and Danny Rolling and the presidential election--all that is recognizable to me.

I know that's a low form of appreciation, to just say "yes I was there that's my story too." But it is, and that's a point the narrator recognizes, the typicality of her narrative. There's a post-Florida section of the novel, and its sadness is how all places turn out to be like Florida, to have this same seriality and placelessness.

(but also, on the yes-I-recognize-it tip: boys in the novel keep saying they'll drop out of school and go sell Quaaludes on Miami Beach. It's a boast: I don't need this crap, I can go make tons of money any time I want. For my set, it was "I'm going to drop out of school and make lots of money tinting car windows.")

The novel ends with an attempt on the narrator's part to -- I don't know, to apprehend a girl in all her singularity and innocence and seriality and doom. In all senses of the word "apprehend." It's beautiful, that ending, and I think I have to re-read the novel before saying much about that part.