My Friend Dahmer

Derf Backderf is a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1970s and early 1980s when he becomes friends with Jeffrey Dahmer, a classmate who will grow into one of America's most notorious serial killers. This graphic memoir looks back on that friendship from the author's own side of it.

The story moves through two schools, Eastview Junior High and Revere High School. Backderf draws a boy who is bullied and isolated, who drinks heavily, who is fixated on roadkill, and who will do almost anything to get noticed.

Around that boy stand adults who see none of it, or see it and do nothing. The book watches Dahmer's pathology harden slowly, over years, while every grown-up nearby fails to read the signs.

It is a memoir told in stark black-and-white panels, and its tone is sober and unsettling rather than sensational.

Backderf rebuilds their shared adolescence scene by scene, so the reader gets a close and uncomfortable view of how ordinary a dangerous person can look from nearby. It suits readers of true crime and memoir who want to understand the person, and the school years that surrounded him, more than the later crimes.