Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

In the Dead Girl Show, the girl body is both a wellspring of and a target for sexual wickedness.

Clearly Dead Girls help us work out our complicated feelings about the privileged status of white women in our culture.

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

Domestic violence is one of the strongest indicators of future mass violence,

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.

or, conversely, had somehow not yet begun to exist.”

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

a dream nemesis who is inevitably a reflection of themselves.

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