20.

Why is Lecter so lovable? Why is Dexter, the Showtime series about a serial killer with a mordant wit, so popular? How do we account for the huge sales of books on monstrous psychopaths, such as Anne Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me, her account of Ted Bundy?

David Schmid addresses such questions in Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture, hailed by Joyce Carol Oates as a “persuasively argued, meticulously researched, and compelling examination of the media phenomenon of the ‘celebrity criminal’ in American culture.” Schmid is most interested in this paradox: although Americans roundly condemn serial killers as monsters, our culture still treats these murderers as if they were famous actors or musicians.

In our media markets, serial killers thrive. In the competition for high ratings, serious news outlets and tabloids alike must draw on the most attention-grabbing stories possible, and lurid murderers provide eye-catching copy.

There are also psychological reasons why repetitive murderers are celebrities. We are fascinated by these criminals because they break constraining laws and conventions and, in their place, establish their own rules of behavior. They do what they want, when they want, while we labor under the burden of “thou shalt not.”

This duplicity is archetypally American. Think of our vexed cultural relationship to the cowboy. We might disapprove of his lawless gunslinging and Indian killing, but we laud his indifference to the East Coast status quo and his fearless trekking into the Western wilds.

The serial killer, Schmid asserts, is as American as apple pie, a revelation of the imperialistic aggression (we must destroy enemies of the American way) lurking underneath our self-righteous puritanism (we must construct godly cities). He is our true familiar, what we love about our American selves and hate, John Wayne and Ted Kaczynski at once. He is our Jungian shadow: symbol of all that we want to forget about ourselves but that nevertheless is essential to our being.