I have a weird fascination with serial killers. *Cue ominous music and maniacal laugh* I’ve always been super intrigued by their lives and their thought processes and where they fit into the history of American crime. So when I happened upon this lovely little tome (complete with several pages of black and white glossy pictures in the middle!) at a book fair, it seemed too good to be true, and of course, it totally was.
My preexisting curiosity for the morbid realm of serial killers notwithstanding, what piqued my interest in this book in particular was the fact that it promised to shift the focus away from the serial killers themselves and focus on the individuals who survived the attacks of some of the country’s most notorious murderers. Whoa. Personally I had never even entertained the idea that there might have been people who encountered evil men like Jeffrey Dahmer and Dennis Rader and lived to tell their stories. But, yes indeed, author Fred Rosen chronicles the stories of 7 individuals who came face to face with infamous serial killers and lived to tell the tale.
Ok, so even just writing that summary got me excited all over again about the promise of redemption and the rise of the human spirit in the face of pure evil. I just wish that the book lived up to any of that hype. *sigh* You failed us, Mr. Rosen, you let us all down.
Now I’m not knocking the idea – I think there should be more focus on the people who were victims of circumstances such as these as well as those who lived, and less sensationalism of the killers themselves, but Rosen’s book is so far off target, it’s almost comical. I suppose you could look past the spelling and grammatical errors and hey, who hasn’t written the name of the victim instead of the serial killer in the midst of a good story? But, for me, what is impossible to look past is the way he treats those who lost their lives to the killers. For some reason Rosen has decided that instead of viewing the victims in the light of people who just found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong individuals, he writes about them as if they just simply didn’t care enough about their lives to fight the serial killer off and succeed. Never mind that many of the serial killers attacked at night, used mind-altering drugs to subdue their victims or, I don’t know, tied them up or incapacitated them in some way. But no, as Fred Rosen boldly states, if only their will to live was stronger, they would have come out of the attack unscathed. So. Rude.
There are a few not as awful moments in the book wherein he gives details of the lives of the serial killers, which for all my previous investigation into the matter, I was unfamiliar with. And he does give an interesting treatise on the invention and proliferation of the interstate highway system in America (*eye roll*). In all honesty by the end of the novel I got the feeling that Mr. Rosen is just extraordinarily afraid of serial killers and being a victim himself, and so did all this research and tracked down all the survivors and traveled all across the country to find out from each of the survivors what they did that saved their lives so that he can keep those answers in his back pocket for the day when his number is up and a serial killer’s knocking at his front door. This is, I suppose, not the worst motive in the world for writing a book, however, I was pleasantly surprised to find that he was thwarted time after time as each survivor chalked their escape up to something beyond themselves that they could never really explain, which is a great answer, but doesn’t help Mr. Rosen much and that’s just too bad.
So, since the subject matter of this book is far, far different than the subject matter of the previous book in the stack, Dr. Franklin’s Island by Ann Halam, the best connection I can make between the two is the fact that one of the serial killers in There but for the Grace of God, Bobby Joe Long (click here at your own peril if you want to learn more about him) lived and killed people in the FL area which is where the main characters of Dr. Franklin’s Island have a layover at at the very beginning of the novel before their interrupted flight to Brazil. Not a great connection, but it wasn’t a great book, so let’s place the blame there.
I really wanted to give this novel a stack of zero books (a non-stack if you will) because of my outright outrage at varying points in the book, but I decided to give it one lone book and dedicate it to the survivors mentioned in this book and the struggles they must face every day that I’m sure were enhanced by the intrusion of yet another reporter with a supposed soft spot for their plight. For shame, Mr. Rosen, for shame.
The Books of One Stack 