Book Talk: The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife

Michael Libling writes like that affable stranger on the next barstool buying you drinks as he charms you with his stories. Next thing you’ve woken up in an ice bath without a kidney.

Photo by Wedding Photography on Unsplash. Photo manipulation by William Shunn.

The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife
by Michael Libling
348 pp.
WordFire Press
September 4, 2023

The Canadian writer Michael Libling is one of my closest friends (though, reading this, he will probably shake his head sadly and tell me I need to get out more). I point this out now because when I tell you about his latest novel, The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife, you may picture him as a hard-bitten, hard-drinking, tatted-up ghoul who mixes his own blood into a human-skull inkpot. In real life, like most horror writers I know, he’s one of the nicest, most self-effacing folks out there.

I first met Michael in July 2002 at a KGB Literary Bar reading where I was appearing as the undercard for China Miéville (and that’s a whole different story). I read a science-fiction-flavored section of my memoir-then-in-progress, set in Calgary. As an interested Canadian, Michael struck up a conversation with me afterward. I had not read his work before, but I soon became a rabid fan of his short fiction — slippery, multi-layered stuff which walks an often sardonic line between fantasy, science fiction, and horror.

The marketplace has not always gotten what Michael is up to in his fiction. His struggles to kick his way out of literary corrals are chronicled with typical drollness in his essay “Genrealities: Five Honest-to-Goodness True Stories of Everyday Humiliations,” published in Canadian Notes & Queries in 2011 (and republished in 2018 in my short-lived Piltdown Review). His first published novel, the excellent Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels (an expansion of his World Fantasy Award-nominated novella suffused with the forgotten lore of Canada’s silent film industry), did not appear until 2019.

Now he is back with The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife, a fast-paced, gut-churning novel that’s worth its long wait in gold. The book is the first-person account of Bobby Blessing, an ice cream shop owner and would-be writer who has spent his life hiding the fact that his father is the Brittle Butcher, a notorious serial killer awaiting execution in Florida.

Bobby lives a quiet life in Saratoga Springs, NY, trying to stay off the radar of his father’s creepy fans, right up until an attractive and assertive dentist named Cori Widdoes walks into his shop. Before you know it, Bobby and Cori and married, and Cori has pressured Bobby into moving back to his childhood town of Hillsdale, where he still holds the deed to the family house. Not many folks are happy to see him back, including the police detective who used to be his best friend, or the caretaker named Tusk who writes bestselling books but speaks like an illiterate.

And that’s before local folks start turning up grotesquely murdered — with all the evidence pointing to him. And before Cori pressures Bobby to pay a visit to his father on Death Row…

Libling packs a plenty of incident into this efficient, twisty thriller, and plenty of subtext too. On the autopsy table are not just questions of what our parents pass on to us and what we do or do not owe them in return, but also trenchant commentary on art vs. commerce in the publishing world, our morbid fascination with true crime, and even how well we can know the people closest to us. It all culminates with one of the most giddily horrifying, horrifyingly giddy grand guignol set pieces I’ve ever read. As much as I wanted to look away from the page, I couldn’t — either time I read it.

One of my favorite things about Libling’s writing has always been his voice — chummy, wisecracking, cynical — and The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife takes full advantage of its marvelous capacity for misdirection. His prose is deceptively simple and smooth. It slips between your ribs like a stiletto. Before you know what’s happening, you’re laughing or bleeding or both.

But more than that, Michael Libling’s zingy prose conceals a big heart — ripped from some stranger’s chest, yes, but still warm and beating. The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife is an experience like no other. Scoop it up while you still have the breath for laughter. ∅

Michael Libling will appear in person at Northshire Bookstore, 424 Broadway, Saratoga Springs, NY, February 27, 2024, 6:00 pm. Don’t miss it for your life.