Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Like a deranged version of the gopher from Caddyshack, Murderland tunnels through American history following the life and crimes of Ted Bundy as its through line, while chaos erupts on the surface around it.

Caroline Fraser's book is an interesting but scattered look at not only the timeline of active serial killers but the natural and unnatural events that contributed to mass death in the same era, most of it documented, some of it debatable.

Sidenote: Fraser isn't an outside observer here. She grew up in Tacoma in the same area where Bundy and Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, spent their childhoods.

The book is a no-frills exploration, almost textbook-like, into potential connections between environment, upbringing, and what shapes a murderer. It covers a wide roster including Bundy, the Green River Killer, the Night Stalker, the Hillside Strangler, and Charles Manson, all of whom spent significant time in the Pacific Northwest during an era when the region's smelters were pumping lead, arsenic, and a cocktail of industrial toxins into the air, water, and soil. Fraser's central argument is that this wasn't a coincidence.

Sometimes that argument genuinely raises your eyebrows. The data point that's hardest to dismiss: as leaded gasoline bans took effect in the early 1990s and the smelters closed, the era of the serial killer essentially ended. Hmmmm....

But sometimes it feels like a reach. Attempts to rationalize why someone became a monster can be intellectually interesting while simultaneously feeling like they're doing the victims a disservice, reducing decades of calculated evil to a chemistry problem. Fraser is careful enough to hedge her bets, but careful hedging in a neat 500 page book still leaves you wondering whether this needed to be a long-form magazine piece rather than a full volume.

And that's where Murderland loses some ground. The length is the real monster here. It covers so much territory that it periodically loses the thread, or worse, strains to force one where the evidence won't quite stretch. That's not to say it's bad or uninteresting. It's a well-researched, informative book from a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who clearly knows her subject matter deeply. If anything it'll leave you wanting to pull on one of its threads and research it properly yourself, which is genuinely one of the better things a nonfiction book can do.

Dan Cummins's podcast Timesuck covers similar material with more focus and considerably more detail and personality, injecting humor into subject matter that can otherwise become genuinely oppressive to sit with. Fraser's version is more rigorous but less alive.

Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers poses a fascinating central question: was the Pacific Northwest a genuine hotbed of death because of decades of negligent toxic exposure, or was the clustering of killers in the region ultimately a coincidence? It's one of the more interesting questions a true crime book could ask. Unfortunately, by getting so wide-ranging and occasionally scattered, it never tackles that question in a fully satisfying way. You'll finish it wanting the answer more than when you started, which is either a flaw or a feature depending on your outlook.