It would have been impossible to write a book like this without sympathising with its subject.
The author walks a difficult line as he tries to make sense of the person he knew without valorising a serial killer. The graphic novel has now been turned into a film directed by Marc Meyers, which is currently doing the festival circuit – its second screening at MIFF has been selling fast.īackderf went to school with Dahmer in the 1970s and, in the aftermath of his classmate’s crimes, did what we all would do in that situation – scoured his memory for any signs, any telling incidents, any possibility that he or the others around him might have made a difference. My Friend Dahmer, a graphic novel by journalist and illustrator John ‘Derf’ Backderf, explores what happens to someone when the glass shatters and they have a direct line into the kind of horror we always think of as stories that happen to someone else. It’s hard to imagine something from outside our realm of experience until it actually happens. This is not to say we need to amp up the paranoia it’s just a fact. Subconsciously, we believe in the flimsy layer of glass that protects us. Yes, monsters hide in plain sight, but not within our field of vision. Mary Mead out of pulp and references to Poirot’s moustache.ĭespite the fact that we are fully aware of the realities, most of us find it difficult to believe that the really bad stuff could ever truly intersect with our own lives. The result is four CSIs, two NCISs, six Law and Orders and enough Agatha Christie books in the world that we could build our own St. It’s also what fuels our appetite for crime in entertainment the closeness we all feel to the darker side of the human experience needs an outlet. It’s what makes us grumpily trudge along the well-lit ‘long way’ rather than the shadowy shortcut.
It’s what makes us cross the road when we spot someone vaguely shifty looking. We all have ‘what ifs’ gnawing away at our cores. We weren’t there but we could have been, and the one degree of separation makes us feel both safe yet involved. A restaurant you went to one time catches fire. You witness a car accident on your regular route home. We all know crime surrounds us, and we are reminded of its proximity by the ‘near misses’ that happen with almost surprising regularity, chipping away at our veneer of safety. It’s not a stretch, then, to think that the runner that Dahmer nearly attacked that day would have heard the story, figured out the role he almost played, and been haunted by the idea of ‘what if’. He later said that had he been arrested six months later, he would have completed his plan of building an altar made of (among other things) his victims’ heads, bookended by two complete skeletons.ĭahmer lived in a small town his horrific crimes dominated the news for months. He was surprisingly open about his crimes and intentions, telling police and interviewers about things that had happened in his youth of the fantasies that had plagued him for years, on the time he nearly killed a neighbourhood dog – and his plan to attack the runner. The desire to injure and kill remained, but following that day’s failure he wouldn’t act on it for another few years – not until he turned eighteen.īy the time he was caught in 1991, Dahmer had murdered seventeen boys and men, keeping ‘trophies’ from the bodies of most of his victims.
Thwarted, Dahmer eventually trudged home and gave up on the idea completely. Maybe he was taking a break perhaps he was trying a new route. So, one day, baseball bat in hand, he hid along the running track and waited for the man to appear.įor whatever reason, that day the runner didn’t show up. He grew progressively more invested in his fantasy of knocking the man out, of having power over him – and this desire grew and grew, until Dahmer could no longer stand it. When Jeffrey Dahmer was a teenager he became obsessed with a runner who would go past his house most days.