The Avenue of the Giants

April 28, 2014
Dugain (The Officers’ Ward) pens a tale of a serial killer that’s curiously short on murder. Based on the life of actual serial killer Edmund Kemper, the story of Al certainly begins violently, with his murder of both of his paternal grandparents on the day J.F.K. is shot. At age 15, Al is sent to California’s Atascadero state psychiatric hospital, where discussions with his shrink reveal classic sociopath traits. Al is more intelligent than Einstein, but was reviled and abused by his mother. As a child, he killed family cats, and he has sexual fantasies about decapitating women. Despite this, he’s eventually released and moves to Santa Cruz, where his record is eventually expunged. Al begins giving rides to hitchhiking coeds and even befriends the head of the local homicide squad. Al has trouble with “bad thoughts,” but it isn’t until the dramatic conclusion that the reader learns the extent of Al’s depravity.

May 1, 2014
In the mid-1960s, a teenager named Edmund Kemper murdered his grandparents. After spending several years in a state hospital, he was released and almost immediately began a killing spree that took the lives of several young women. In this extremely compelling novel, French author Dugain creates a fictional character, Al Kenner, who shares a lot of Kemper's personal history as well as his high IQ. Narrated by the fictional Kenner, the book takes us deep inside the mind of an extremely intelligent killer who is smart enough to know not only that he has the capacity for horrific behavior but also how to conceal his impulses. Far more compelling than any nonfiction account of Kemper's life could possibly bea skilled novelist writing about a fictional character can go places a nonfiction chronicler cannotthe novel leaves us with the feeling that we've met a man who's very good at killing and who, chillingly, is not as different from us as we'd like him to be.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)