You Keep Telling Yourself That, Pal…

John Wayne Cleaver has some (most) indicators that he’ll probably be a serial killer one day:

The superficial/not actual indicators:  His middle name is Wayne, his dad is named Sam (which makes him the Son of Sam), his last name’s Cleaver, he’s obsessed with serial killers.

The real:  The “triad”–bedwetting, animal cruelty, and a compunction towards arson.  Oh yeah, and he’s a sociopath.

But as much as John studies serial killers, he keeps telling us and his therapist that he’s studying them so that he knows what not to do.  He creates rules for himself (much like Dexter), and much like Dexter, he starts noticing that he’s bending those rules.  The rules are the only thing that’s keeping the “monster behind the wall”.  However, when a real serial killer begins operating in his town, John might be the only one who will be able to figure who that person is and how to stop him.

I enjoyed this book.  John knows what kind of a monster he is/could be.  And because he is who he is, he doesn’t really care about others. He’s interested in a girl who lives on his block, but he knows that’s dangerous (especially because he called her it once).  He has a best friend because he knows he should…nothing about John is normal, but he works hard at attempting to appear that way.  There’s a supernatural element to the serial killer that John find out and without giving anything away, I thought that it took away from the story.  I was looking forward to more cat and mouse play between the perpetrator and John but instead it resolved pretty quickly.  I see that this was book one in a series, I’ll be interested to see what John is “becoming”  (in the immortal words of Hannibal Lechter).