Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

a dream nemesis who is inevitably a reflection of themselves.

Fairy tales are weird, distilled expressions of our inherited desires, and the Dead Girl Show, with its idyllic, uncanny small-town setting, is absolutely in the same tradition—it is no wonder that Sigmund Freud believed fairy tales could be interpreted like collective dreams.

it mystifies the killer in ways that are not only counterproductive but also insidious.

He views crime as a natural phenomenon, like a weather pattern, which comes and goes in streaks like seasons, and the serial killer as a pure “bad guy” whose habits are too dark and powerful to be conceived of:

the maternal element returns “via horror, repulsion, the uncanny, haunting, melancholia, depression, guilt.”

“There’s very good reason I don’t see many women investigators on cases like this. It’s not natural.” Then why is it natural for male investigators?

Externalizing the impulse to prey on young women cleverly depicts it as both inevitable and beyond the control of men.

The first is that girls are wild, vulnerable creatures who need to be protected from the power of their own sexualities.

She had the impulse to ask her professor “whether women were somehow always already dead,