Love Letters to a Serial Killer
By Tasha Coryell
Orion Books
ISBN: 978-1-398-71673-5
320pp.

It would be uncharitable to discredit all the effort Tasha Coryell has put into writing this beach-read disguised as a psychological thriller. However, Orion Books can be more justifiably censured for publishing Love Letters to a Serial Killer.

Barring a somewhat unique premise, the novel has little to recommend it, and is a perfect example of how marketing often sadly prevails over merit in the publishing industry of the 21st century.

The book is written in first-person and the protagonist, Hannah Wilson (based in Minneapolis), is a more pathetic and mentally unbalanced version of Helen Fielding’s famed Bridget Jones. Hannah is a character with whom several readers may initially wish to sympathise, if for no other reason than because her clownish personality and femininity makes her terrifyingly vulnerable to the genuinely evil characters in the novel.

Four terrifying murders (the victims are all women) occur in Georgia, and Hannah becomes as obsessed by the cases as sundry other individuals on social media. It appears as if the brutal crimes are the work of a serial killer, who strangled the women and then tossed them down a ravine. Although the women are not alike in any major way, they were all acquainted with a successful lawyer named William Thompson. Police take him into custody and Hannah decides to take the dangerous step of writing letters to him prior to his trial.

The murders of four women and the arrest of the suspect prompts a young woman to start corresponding with the killer in jail in a mediocre novel

Hannah is by no means the only woman who is fascinated enough by the persona of William to engage in such reckless behaviour. However, for reasons that are never made clear by Coryell, William starts writing back to Hannah on a regular basis!

It is entirely possible that many who purchased the book would have wished to toss it aside at this point. However, those hapless few (such as myself) who persevered and continued to slog through it would have no doubt been horrified that, having let her career in public-relations and event-planning get neglected because of her obsession, Hannah then proceeds to get fired.

The icing on the cake is provided by Coryell pulling out all the stops and having her anti-heroine wrap up her life in the Midwest and move to Georgia in order to follow the case more closely.

To be fair to William, there is very little evidence on his side of the correspondence to indicate that he is cruel or evil (although serial killers are often nothing if not deceptive). Checking into a cheap motel in Georgia, Hannah discovers that William comes from a very moneyed and influential family. In his letters, William confides in her that his parents placed obscenely high expectations on both him and his brother, Bentley. Hannah gets so sexually attracted to William that she is more than willing to believe in his innocence.

I will obviously not spoil a reader’s perusal of the novel by indicating whether William is guilty or not. However, the case against him is largely circumstantial, and other major male characters (such as Bentley and the men’s affluent father Mark) are set up as potential perpetrators of the crimes midway through the novel.

No character grips the reader’s attention as much as Hannah, however, since her portrayal is the most detailed. She ranges from being utterly unethical to frustratingly naïve. It is clear that Coryell hasn’t mastered the art of writing good comedy; several of the author’s jokes, made at Hannah’s expense, fall flat, while others don’t come across as even remotely funny, given the grim darkness of the subject matter.

It seems as if Coryell put very little thought into effecting thematic development beyond the relatively original premise of the novel. The author appears to have been unable to create either a truly crazed protagonist, or an innocent and easily duped heroine. Therefore, Hannah falls midway between these extremes, and the result, unfortunately, is a character that is both despicable and idiotic.

Avid readers of psychological thrillers will be able to guess the real identity of the murderer halfway through the novel. Since Coryell holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama, I was surprised as to why she simply didn’t combat certain structural issues that arose from tedious and long-drawn-out plot machinations by simply making the book shorter.

Possibly if the letter had come at a different time when I hadn’t just been fired and the future didn’t feel like a giant black hole waiting to swallow me up, I would’ve spent more time considering the situation rather than reacting with elation. William, after all, came wrapped in red flags, the way that the murdered women were wrapped in tarps before they were disposed of in the ravine. As it was, I couldn’t make myself care. Boyfriends who were serial killers were still boyfriends. In some ways, William was better and more attentive than many of the men my friends dated. He was smart, well-read, considerate. He listened to Taylor Swift and liked a house that smelled good. Most importantly, he wanted me, just me.

I think that the author struggled with creating a hybrid between a saccharine romance and a fairly predictable murder mystery. The result is a novel that is far-fetched at best and painful to read at worst.

Perhaps the best thing that can be said about the novel is that, in spite of being set in the sociologically fractious and prejudiced Deep South, it doesn’t generally come across as particularly racist. Nevertheless, a careful editor at Orion Books should perhaps have guided Coryell into using the term ‘African-American’ as opposed to ‘Black’, and a single superfluous scene, where Hannah gets frightened by a non-white male for no apparent reason other than his colour, could have been edited out entirely.

The central tensions of the novel, however, are related to class and elitism, not colour. Hannah perceives William as a wronged and maligned individual, not out of an innate sense of justice but because she is dazzled by his image, style and sophistication. Towards the latter part of the book I was pleased that she fled from the Midwest when she did, since this move spared her hometown from coming under a harsher narrative spotlight.

There is something rather pathetic about Hannah’s alarming lack of self-esteem and deep-seated inferiority complex. But while it is hinted that her Midwestern background and upbringing are partly to blame for these, the point is never adequately explored.

Perhaps the biggest problem with such books is that the earnestness and sincerity with which a writer like Tasha Coryell might approach her craft does not protect a text from sliding into mediocrity. Like the ravine into which the murderer dumped the bodies of several women, the abyss of this ill-fated novel claims a corpse consisting of unrealistic plot machinations, utterly forgettable characters, and lacklustre writing.

Harsh though this judgement is, it should serve as a cautionary lesson to budding authors that even the best marketing can never do more than place an attractive veneer over a text. And fundamentally mediocre work cannot be redeemed by a cutesy book cover or an enticing blurb, since all that glitters is not gold.

The reviewer is associate professor of social sciences and liberal arts at the Institute of Business Administration. She has authored a collection of short stories, Timeless College Tales, and a play,
The Political Chess King

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, November 24th, 2024