Jasper Dent is a teenager on the verge of adulthood. He has a girlfriend, a loyal best friend, and a loyal group of adult supporters including the town Sheriff and his teachers. Such normalcy is contrasted, however, with the fact that he has been raised by the most notorious serial killer in the world: Billy Dent. Barry Lyga’s novel I Hunt Serial Killers is an intense thriller that deals with coming of age and the many nuances, some of which are horrible, that attend it. Through Jasper “Jazz” Dent young readers can learn an important lesson about how the human mind works, and how “good guys” and “bad guys” are defined.
The novel opens with the discovery of a dead body. The reader is given a sort of long distance perspective on a crime scene investigation taking place. Jazz observes the investigation through a pair of high-tech secretive binoculars given to him by his serial killer dad. The case seems pretty straight forward until Jazz notices that three fingers were severed from the corpse and one finger, the middle finger, was left behind. Jazz deduces based on this evidence that the murderer must be a serial killer. He is unable to convince the Sheriff G. William that the murderer is a serial killer and so Jazz feels the need to undertake the investigation himself. What follows is a high energy, disturbing, journey into the mind of a killer, and the mind of Jazz trying not to become a killer.
Jazz’s perspective is what makes Lyga’s novel so compelling. He is driven to catch the killer, yet is also attracted to the act of killing. Because it is this strange protagonist that is most likely to be attacked by concerned parents and teachers, Jazz’s character should be discussed first. He gets things right. He is one step ahead of every other investigator regarding each case discussed in the novel. He does the right things, he helps the right people, and displays incredible intelligence and awareness. What may cause concern for some readers are the moments in which we encounter the complex inner mind of Jasper Dent. Jazz’s father actively attempted to train him to become a serial killer. Billy Dent forced Jazz to participate with him, forcing him to keep the catalogue of the “souvenirs” that Billy collected from his kills. Throughout the novel there are hints that Billy even forced Jazz to slit his own mother’s throat to kill her, “just like cutting chicken” (2012, p. 43) . Thus violence and gore might turn certain readers, librarians, and especially parents, off.
The really disturbing part of the novel is not the amount of blood and death. The gory scenes are slightly more graphic than those in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series. The truly uneasy passages occur when Jazz is fighting his inner urges to kill and to torture. In a frightening scene toward the end of the novel, Jazz stumbles upon a crime scene immediately after the killer has administered a lethal dosage of Drano to his victim and severed several of her fingers. As Jazz tries to save her life, he cannot help but recall his dad telling him that, “there’s a light goes out in their eyes when someone dies . . . It’s beautiful . . . You gotta get close to hear it go” (2012, p. 198) . As he proceeds to administer CPR to the victim, Jazz thinks the act is, “taking on a tawdry, lurid tenor in his mind – his lips on hers, his hands on her chest, between those same breasts that had been compressed against him so recently” (2012, p. 200) .
Such cruel moments are inescapable, and Lyga does not shy away from them. “The most interesting and gruesome things,” he says, “are what goes on in somebody’s head. To me, the most horrifying thing in the book isn’t what Billy has done to his victims” (Lyga, An Interview with Barry Lyga with Questions from Printz Award-Winning Author Libba Bray, 2013) . It is that mental brutality that redeems and horrifies. After all, we cannot as a society pretend outrage at the thinking portrayed in this novel. We have paid for it. I Hunt Killers has sold thousands of copies and been number one on the New York Times bestsellers list. Some part of this thinking reflects the very thought process of popular culture. And that is where the real value lies for a developing psyche. Every teenager, every honest person from any walk of life, can empathize with the act of resisting evil urges. Who has not wished death upon someone? Who has not courted and conquered madness as well as succumbed to madness? We all have. The message of I Hunt Killers, then, is not that killing is glorious, but that it is atrocious. That it is also attractive simply demonstrates the true heroism of goodness. We all have the same urges. Part of entering adulthood is the choice to succumb to or control those urges.
Bibliography
Lyga, B. (2012). I Hunt Killers. New York: Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Lyga, B. (2013). An Interview with Barry Lyga with Questions from Printz Award-Winning Author Libba Bray. (L. Bray, Interviewer) Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Comments