Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Prairie Fires comes a terrifying true-crime history of serial killers in the Pacific Northwest and beyond—a gripping investigation of how a new strain of psychopath emerged out of a toxic landscape of deadly industrial violenceCaroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?

Meticulously researched . . . A great writer can make art of the most grotesque material, and Ms. Fraser does. As crushing as many of the stories are, we are held in thrall . . . In a climate where killers can be romanticized, Ms. Fraser performs the necessary service of showing them as the troubled, pathetic and deeply dangerous people they are. If her need to find causation is honorable, and the lead-crime conclusion perhaps even true, one should not mistake this for compassion, which Ms. Fraser reserves for the killers victims and for the land itself, which was not given a choice in abetting those it poisoned. Wall Street Journal

The product of vast research into the correlation between violent behavior and neurological damage associated with high levels of environmental pollutants (lead, asbestos, arsenic) in the blood, [Murderland] is an amalgam of true crime reportage, visionary muckraking in the tradition of Rachel Carson s Silent Spring (1962), and a startlingly candid memoir of Fraser s girlhood in the Seattle area in the time of serial killers both individual and corporate . . . A damning inventory of rapacious industrial pollution and sadistic serial killers . . . Though Murderland might be cataloged as ecojournalism, it is also a multi-true-crime narrative related in a breathlessly propulsive manner. Folded into the charges against corporate polluters like ASARCO are passages that fairly spring off the page . . . Commemorating the many victims of serial killers, many of them unnamed, unknown, Fraser s prose is lyrical, elegiac. Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books

Murderland [is] an extraordinarily well-written and genre-defying blend of memoir, social and environmental history, and forensic inquest . . . Fraser s portrayal of the [Guggenheim] family is akin to my colleague (and friend) Patrick Radden Keefe s genealogy of the Sacklers, in his book Empire of Pain . . . Fraser s argumentative style is one of association, a vast crazy wall studded with murders and smelters and industrialists, yoked into patterns with skeins of gripping red yarn . . . Murderland is something of a moody masterpiece. Fraser is an outstanding social, cultural, and environmental historian, and she has an effortless way of turning pontoon bridges into villains. Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker

Murderland is wonderfully propulsive and hard to put down. The Atlantic

In Murderland [Fraser] provides a detailed examination of the confluence of smelting, environmental pollution, poor highway design and murder in the region. It's a miasma of psychopathy on the individual level and greed on the corporate one that makes you wonder whether the definition of "serial killer" ought to be expanded. Melissa Gray, NPR

[Fraser] is such a gifted writer. Reading her prose can be like skiing powder snow on a perfect day, one lovely turn after the other without really knowing where you re going . . . Fraser s book works best as a literary theme crimes of industry choking the life out of the natural world, spawning crimes of the heart . . . The people who got rich off the poisons walked away unscathed, their names now kept alive in art museums and foundations. Though it s an old story, maybe even uniquely American, it is still one worth repeating. The New York Times Book Review