Serial Killer Days: A Novel - Hardcover

Prill, David

3.67

39 ratings by Goodreads

9780312144111: Serial Killer Days: A Novel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312144113 ISBN 13: 9780312144111

Publisher: St Martins Pr, 1996

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For more than twenty years, a serial killer has taken a victim from the town of Standard Springs on the same day in July. And the town has responded as would any American town - by holding its annual fair around the event.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Serial Killer Days.
This year Debbie Sue Morning is eighteen and it's her last chance to win the Scream Queen pageant. But she's got stiff competition from the other girls, especially Molly Lovey, whose horrible shrieks could raise goose bumps on the dead.
And the real truth is that deep down, nothing scares Debbie Sue.
Does Debbie Sue have it in her to win the pageant? Is the stranger who shows up in Mrs. Flatwire's apple orchard actually the killer?

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Review:

Here's a satire about horror for people who don't like horror novels. David Prill mocks society's love for big-name criminals with a story about a small town in Minnesota where an annual visit (and murder) by a serial killer has become a hilarious tourist attraction--complete with floats in a "Parade of Fear," fake blood running in the streets, inflatable weapons hanging from lamp posts, and a contest to choose the new "Scream Queen." Also, it's an effective coming-of-age portrait of a teen named Debbie Sue, who is charmingly distressed about her inability to be frightened.

From Kirkus Reviews:

A second satire from Prill (The Unnatural, 1995), who now tries to squeeze humor from the notion that a small Minnesota town has made a tourist attraction out of an annual visit by an anonymous serial killer. Every summer for 21 years, the town of Standard Springs has seen one of its citizens knocked off in grisly fashion by a mysterious murderer--but instead of weeping, the spunky citizenry has made an annual festival of the event. The weeklong celebration kicks off with a 5K Run For Your Life, continues with sold-out performances of the musical The Sound of Maniacs, and culminates with a Scream Queen beauty pageant and a Fear Parade down Main Street on the night the murder takes place. Pretty young Debbie Morning has longed since childhood to become the Scream Queen, but in her last year of competition, at age 18, she realizes it may just be too late. Debbie's problem is that no matter how hard she tries, she can't quite make herself afraid of anything, and her sunny nature shows up only too well in the scream competition that defines the pageant. This year, she enlists aid wherever she can find it--at scary drive-in movies, in a midnight trip to the evil ``Cities,'' even from the ghoulish cousin of her screaming tutor. When nothing works, poor Debbie is inconsolable, until she stumbles across a mysterious stranger, who turns out to be the reclusive Ole Rimbaud, her favorite poet--the man whose work she plans to recite in the talent division of the Scream Queen pageant! Could this scruffy interloper be the serial killer the town has searched for all these years? And if he is, the town elders wonder, might it be better to let him go on killing, so that Serial Killer Days might live? An occasionally amusing send-up of small-town life, but the premise wears thin much too soon. -- Copyright �1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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