It's rare to come across a work of fiction that is as surprising as it is, on afterthought, inevitable. Generally a book like that would be about a standard subject written in an unusual style, or a book about an atypical subject written in a plain or straightforward style. Baby Killer is definitely the latter.
Written from the point of view of an overeducated observer and harsh critic of modern culture, as we've seen throughout the certified echelons of Literature, we hang out and sink slowly with the Killer of Babies in this first-person confessional.
To tell you the truth, for a book about a killer of infants, the story starts off rather slow. In fact, I became a bit bored until things picked up after about fifty pages of living with yet another well off homebody.
The protagonist carries a bit of the "Stupid pleb's and their alcohol and loud music and sex." A missionary here to stop the Idiocratization of our world. He loves to be alone, and long walks. He loves to read and proselytize. He listens to Radiohead, Leonard Cohen, and bebop jazz. He is, in a deeper vein, the perpetual man-child that is jealous of the effortless attention and love bestowed upon newborns. He is what many grown men fear of becoming, or simply are (and in denial of).
The Killer of Babes, safe in his cocoon, hates society's urge to change:
"They brag about how lightly they can pick up and create new beginnings, a new life for themselves, a new self for their lives."
But the big Butt is that this guy kills little babies. This does happen. He slaughters them with occasional remorse and well-articulated (some might say convincing) rationale. This is a problem that ends up being the most interesting aspect of his soporific personality. Because outside of some light family trauma, the Babe Killer is quite mundane.
"I would rather do nothing than have any sort of stricture imposed on my time, and most days I did quite a bit of nothing."
I won't expound on the actual depictions of his extracurriculars except to say that each instance is unique, vivid, heart-wrenching, and often hilarious.
But this is, when it comes down to it, a character study. The Baby Killer is outwardly pathetic and inwardly God's Gift. He is as much a mirror on our cultural moment as Patrick Bateman was in the 80's. Whereas Bateman went out everyday and overachieved in order to be seen and noticed, the Baby Killer avoids people, jobs, and social interactions at all costs. He's rich (you'll have to read it to know how), so he can do that, but even if he didn't have his golden cushion of wealth, I could see him figuratively being that 30-year-old that still lives in mama's basement, antagonizing true achievers through his digital curtain of anonymity. There is even a hilarious section involving a katana that reads like a neckbeard's wet dream, and the narrator actually says, "It's nothing personal."
This book is such a binary for me that it's hard to judge. If you took out the specific acts it would be as tame as some Austen, but we must include the acts. This isn't Sotos on a diet or anything. Those familiar with transgressive fiction will have nary a feather ruffled (though maybe I'm a deathly numb sociopath). But it is a work of thrilleresque appeal. A work of the moment that I don't think could have been written at any other time. It probably says something about consumer culture and apathy. It definitely holds a mirror to doughy rich mama's boys that are afraid of commitment. It held my attention in the way that a horror movie by Wes Anderson might. An oddly comforting read that I bet you'd enjoy.
*I realize that this review comes off a bit negative and vague, and the novel did in fact go down slightly lukewarm, but I want to state that I do highly recommend it to readers of transgressive (for lack of a better term) literature. It is an important book.*
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