Book Review: The Serial Killers' Club, by Jeff Povey

A most interesting first novel. Very dark humor, one might say.

The story begins when the protagonist, who goes by "Dougie", kills a serial killer known as Grandson of Barney in self-defense (is that grandson of Barney the Dinosaur or Barney Rubble? Okay, bad joke, I know). Anyway, GOB (well, I'm not writing it out all the time) was about to kill Dougie, but Dougie killed him instead. After Doug killed GOB, he looked through GOB's wallet. The most interesting thing he found was a personal ad inviting GOB to dinner that was signed "Errol Flynn." Dougie replies on GOB's behalf. He becomes rather obsessed with meeting this Flynn person and ends up flying to Chicago at the urging of a subsequent message.

In Chicago he finds a club for serial killers. The club meets at a local restaurant, and they all use the names of famous actors and actresses as pseudonyms. Yes, there are female serial killers in the club too, which kind of surprised me. I wouldn't have expected male serial killers (or anyone, really) to want to hang out with women who like blowtorch men's privates. But I'm no expert here (either on the blowtorching or male serial killers' social habits).

Anyway, Dougie (for Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; he never does say his real name) loves the club. He thinks it is the best thing that ever happened to him. He loves the stories and thinks of the club members as his friends. Everyone thinks he is GOB, so supposedly he belongs. He certainly seems to feel at home. The only thing is, he's not really GOB, and GOB obviously hasn't killed anyone in awhile. He tells everyone he was going through a "killer's block" similar to writer's block, but not everyone buys this. Some people challenge him in private, and since Dougie would do anything to stay in the club, he has to get rid of them.

Dougie's life becomes considerably more complicated when a very strange FBI agent named Kennet (no "h") Wade enters the picture. He confronts Dougie with a picture of him killing one of the club members and tells him that since he is basically doing a public service by killing serial killers, he has two months to finish the job. Dougie is not particularly happy about this. He doesn't want to kill people just to kill them, even serial killers, not for reasons of conscience, but because there won't be a club left if he kills all its members. But he can't exactly say no to Agent Wade, who threatens him with the electric chair if he doesn't go along. So Dougie keeps offing members of the club and trying to keep the surviving ones from catching on. To make matters even more complicated, he falls for one of the members, "Betty Grable." Not an especially wise choice given how she likes to get rid of her sexual partners, but Dougie seems undeterred by this.

Dougie is a most unlikely "hero", which makes this book all the funnier and scarier and more bizarre. He is hardly the serial killer type, but that's exactly what he ends up doing. It's like the first killing, of GOB, gave him this rush that he wanted to duplicate, even though it was never his intention to start offing serial killers; it was really just a way to ensure that he could stay in the club. I guess maybe that's why he felt so at home in the club; he finally met people with whom he had something in common. How touching.