Rating: 
Summary: Get to Know 15 Serial Killers
Review: 15 Serial Killers is an edgy, innovative collection of short stories that often reads like true crime. Jaffe's unflinching yet non-judgemental treatment of the sadistic details is both disturbing and thought provoking. The concept of a "Docufiction" is to fictionalize real events and people, often giving a clearer view into the chaotic mind of the killer than any book-length factual account could.Although Jaffe employs many different formats; dialog, monologue, talk show transcript, there is still a pronounced completeness to the book. These 15 different stories explore the relationship between the serial killer as an individual and society's fascination with them.
Rating:
Summary: Spectacle & Action: Harold Jaffe's Brilliant Public Fiction
Review: Every culture is obsessed with sex and death. But American Puritanism makes us squeamish when we imagine both at the same time. We take Paris Hilton and the DC snipers in separate doses. Serial killers bridge the realms of sex and death. And, by adding Americans' love for celebrity to the mix, they become superstars. Aileen Wournos is just the latest example. Yet we need to deny our fascination. We pretend to read the papers for our edification, not the gory details. So we look at the fragments, and we can't -- or won't -- put the pieces together. Harold Jaffe can and does. In his new book, 15 SERIAL KILLERS, Jaffe -- a master at public fiction -- pushes the full dimensions of our prurience -- and the subjects and objects of our perverse fantasies -- straight into our own consciousness. Jaffe's book presents "docufictions," in which he delineates the lives and crimes of serial killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Henry Kissinger, the Son of Sam, Charles Manson, and Dr. Jack Kevorkian. The portraits include summations of events, detailed backstories, and "interviews" of the kind that make these killers stars. Jaffe probes the mass murderers' similarities -- and their individuality. In so doing, he uncovers their grotesque cultural significance. In his previous book, the deeply probing FALSE POSITIVE, Jaffe explored current events -- from road rage to Mideast violence. His mastery of public fiction allows him to mine the underlying "politicalness" of events and occurences, which makes his stories of headline-grabbing killers in his latest book both startling and unnerving. Yet Jaffe also has a great grasp of story. In "Lonely Hearts," a more-than-twisted Nathanael West tale, Jaffe tells the story of Martha Beck and Ramon Fernandez, ballroom dancers who seduce lonely widows with money. It is both road story and romance. Martha is jealous of Ramon. Ramon is obsessively vain about his hairpiece. In the end, he kills Martha, then himself. In this story, limning the lives of largely unknown killers, Jaffe strikes a fine balance betwen the deeply personal and the deeply American sense of thwarted longing. When he returns to the more wholly public sphere, Jaffe is equally skilled. He skewers the relationship betwen Nixon and Kissinger: "Iago and Iago." Jaffe describes the private turmoil of his killers, creating -- yes -- sympathy for his characters alongside his penetrating public insights. In these docufictions, we learn equally of John Wayne Gacy's successful management of a KFC franchise, of the Yonkers' Police Department's "media grab" in the arrest of the Son of Sam, of Ted Bundy's delight in biting his victims, and of the "game show' nature of current American "reality," as fictional hosts ask banal questions of their murderous guests. The cumulative effect is one of a mixed mayhem -- public and private -- that we typically ignore. Jaffe is fundamentally an epistemologist. He strikes hard at the core of what we know and how we know it in our "information age." His narrative strategies serve his ends well and they provoke, agitate, and ultimately compel. We emerge from our immersion in the lives and aftermaths of these killers questioning not only our collective values, our assumptions, our way of looking at what we know about the world, but also questioning ourselves. When we reach the end of these 15 bone-chilling portraits, we must ask ourselves: do we ("God forbid")identify with any of these characters? These monsters? That we get to ask this question at all is a great testimony to the success of this book. 15 SERIAL KILLERS is another Harold Jaffe masterpiece.
Rating:
Summary: Will the true serial killer please stand up?
Review: True, Harold Jaffe trots out the familiar lineup of culturally certified serial killers, but, then, plopped in the center, is Henry Kissinger. Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, along with his mentor and competitor, Richard Nixon, Kissinger is the real villain of Jaffe's remarkably subtle volume. Kissinger's licit murders--Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, East Timor--are not merely overlooked, but applauded by the sheepish culture, even as the illicit individual serial killer, such as the impoverished, abused Aileen Wuornos, is sanctimoniously vilified. It is the capitalist culture that condemns in order to consume that is Jaffe's real target, and as usual his aim is unerring.
This volume is as revolutionary as it is courageous.
Rating:
Summary: *---------*
Review: In 15 Serial Killers, Jaffe turns our eyes again to the lurid margins of the culture. His intention: not simply to revivify an assorted gallery of killers' crimes in all their gory, sensational detail, but to examine how we condemn and consume these acts in the same breath. As the news media and Hollywood have long understood, murder is sexy, attention-grabbing (consider the other texts grouped with this one: Dead and Buried: A Shocking Account of Rape, Torture and Murder on the California Coast; Evidence of Murder: A Twisted Killer's Trail of Violence; No, Daddy, Don't: A Father's Murderous Act of Revenge. They offer a virtual smorgasbord of sensationalism). We consume murder and murderers like we consume porn - though with less trepidation or shame. We are, Jaffe suggests, like the parasitic Helga-Lee Uberroth in "Wuornos," who befriends the notorious killer Aileen Wuornos only to revel in the spectacle of her life, profit from it. We watch CNN intently, feel the easy moral outrage, the readily available mixture of disgust and arousal, feel virtuous, then move on, never probing deeper. A deeper probe is Jaffe's intent (see also his Sex for the Millennium). This is not to condone the murders themselves. To have some small compassion for the killer, some interest in understanding him or her, is not to sanction the act or to negate compassion for the victim(s). And compassion, beneath the stylization and dark humor, is what Jaffe is ultimately after (and is arguably what Jaffe is after in all of his works). The suffering caused by those on the margins should not close us off to the suffering felt by them, he suggests - nor should the media's packaging of the acts. (Much of the meat of this collection of docufictions, of course, has been culled from actual news accounts. Yes, Jaffe treats this material, but the prevailing attitudes toward serial killers and the prevailing modes of representing them are already in place; Jaffe merely seeks to expose how we are asked to think about them. In that sense, this collection continues the work of False Positive, which even more directly works to expose the media's distortion of news and history). 15 Serial Killers is worth reading precisely because it avoids further sensationalizing the serial killer, precisely because it humanizes or re-humanizes those dehumanized by infotainment and easy public regard. By following Jaffe to these extremes, perhaps we come closer to Bataille's freedom - to thought and feeling less prone to mediation, contamination, colonization.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing and Hard-Hitting
Review: This book grabs you right from the get-go, dropping you into the scene of the crime in a way unlike any I've read before: the "docufiction" approach merges the newsstories with a fictional re-enactment that immerses the reader in the reality of the murders in an intriguing way. This is what true crime fiction SHOULD do, but doesn't, because it's so repressed and interested in the lawful side of non-fiction. Here Jaffe expresses himself freely -- even as he is clearly writing in an objective manner, keeping the narrator out of the picture in each character study. 15 SERIAL KILLERS is a fascinating literary experiment even as it's a disturbing horrorshow, entering into the scene of the crime and the twisted methods and mentations of fifteen of the world's most notorious serial killers. Dahmer, Gacy, Bundy, Gein... they're all here for the party. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: Repetition
Review: I picked this book up on finals week at the SDSU Bookstore because I've seen multiple copies sitting there, unsold, and kinda felt sorry for this faculty member and his brand of odd fiction. Now I want to take it back. I have read some of Jaffe's other books but this is exactly the same as the others. His talky stories all have the same voice and all have the same theme, with no character development, no emotion, no plot, no structure, and not even a hint of good writing development. It's repetition after repetition and grows old, very old, very fast. One may hope the author may try to expand his horizons and content in his next book.
Rating:
Summary: 15 Serial Killers
Review: Harold Jaffe's collection of "docufictions" delves into the lives of a Hall-of-Fame list of serial killers that includes Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, and, yes, Henry Kissinger. Like other Jaffe works (False Positive, Eros Anti-Eros, Straight Razor) these stories encompass a range of innovative narrative styles - letters, dialogues, talk-show transcripts, interviews, as well as more traditional prose. While many have tried exploring the whys and wherefores of such ignominious minds before, none have done so like Jaffe. The 15 pieces here are as insightful as they are captivating. They lure one into the story and yank the emotional heartstrings; creating disgust one minute, a belly laugh the next. No punches are pulled with the subject matter and some of the graphic description is unsettling, indeed. But a strange compassion or tenderness shines through when least expected; there was some humanity to these serial killers after all, no matter how rarely exhibited. Throughout the book, Jaffe keeps the reader guessing; he's done extensive research into his subjects, so the line between fact and fiction is oftentimes deceptive. Also, the narratives of these notorious figures were (and still are) shaped in large part by the mass media, and, as usual, Jaffe's narratives reflect this as only he can. Highly recommended to those who aren't afraid to peek at the underbelly of our culture, or anyone looking for a highly charged reading experience.
Rating:
Summary: Embrace the butcher
Review: Yet more serial killers, you ask? Well, yes and no. Sure, the usual suspects are mostly all there: Bundy, Wuornos, Dahmer, Gacy, the Night Stalker, the Unabomber, Speck, Son of Sam . . . But what is Henry Kissinger doing in that company, coming off, in Jaffe's version, as a serial mass murderer of entire countries, dwarfing any of the other official serial killers by comparison. As usual, Jaffe's writing is so sharp, his pitch perfect, the cadences so precise, that even the most graphic violence is transformed into a rare sort of poetry. With all the hoopla over the movie Monster, Jaffe's version of Aileen Wuornos is far and away superior in its complexity and, finally, compassion for the female "serial killer". Technically, 15 Serial Killers is a tour de force, but its profundity is more than technical; rather it's a combination of moral daring, passion, the keenest intelligence, and remarkably varied prose.
Rating:
Summary: This way to the gas, ladies and gentlemen
Review: Jaffe has been called a literary pioneeer, and rightly. His tendency is to treat the seemingly most intractable material and somehow transform it into a potent message on behalf of those segments of society that other people--including writers--do not--or choose not to--see. Here, Jaffe's subject is serial killers, and though the names are familiar--Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, Son of Sam, the Unabomber--the treatment is like nothing you can imagine. The best way I can put it is that when you finish this amazing volume it is as though your eyes have been sewn wide open.
Rating:
Summary: revolutionary dialogues
Review: How can a single volume of "docufictions" be graphically violent,
elegantly stylized, philosophically revolutionary and irrepressibly
funny all at once? Jaffe somehow brings it off. Given the subject matter, the graphic violence goes without speaking;
the stylization is in how the individual narratives (each "story"
belongs to a different serial killer) are modeled. Jaffe presents us
with monologues, "unsituated dialogues," letters, playlets, mock TV
talk shows, and various combinations of these modalities. The result
is not chaos but its opposite, a kind of fluidly elegant architecture
of form. Revolution is, it seems, the intent; a revolution of
consciousness which has aligned the serial murderer with the powerful
politician or media capitalist and demonstrated conclusively the
greater virtue of the serial murderer. As in False Positive, Straight
Razor, Sex for the Millennium and his other books, Jaffe is comical
in ways that can't easily be described--a combination of the
language, the uncannily accented rhythm and the wildly incongruous
details and images. The upshot is a virtuosic performance which is at the same time an
extraordinarily trenchant commentary on our post-Millennial culture.
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