I Am Not a Serial Killer

Fifteen-year-old John Wayne Cleaver is fascinated by serial killers, works in his family's mortuary, and has been diagnosed as a sociopath. Terrified of the monster he fears he could become, he lives by a strict set of self-imposed rules designed to keep his darker impulses caged.

When a string of brutal, ritualistic murders strikes his small Midwestern town, John's clinical knowledge of killers makes him uniquely able to understand what is happening, and he becomes obsessed with hunting the culprit down.

But the closer he gets, the more he realizes the killer is not what anyone expects, and stopping it may require him to unleash the very darkness he has spent his life suppressing. Blending small-town horror, psychological character study, and a genuinely unsettling supernatural threat, the novel pairs a coldly logical narrator with mounting dread.

As John walks the line between detective and predator, the story asks whether a person can use their worst instincts for good without being consumed by them.