Backderf, D. (2012). My friend Dahmer: A graphic novel. New
York: Abrams.
The retelling of the life of a troubled teenager that leads to the dramatic and quite bloody culmination of the life of a serial killer is something that perhaps is not the conventional types of reading a teenager does, yet I suppose, might be the type of intriguing reading that will capture the attention of some teenagers.
Jeff is no ordinary teenager to say the least. Aside from being an outcast and perhaps considered to be a little bit weird, or to call it as he was called many times by his classmates, a "freak," Jeff had an unconventional interest in dead things. It started with him putting animal carcasses in acid to feed his fascination for bones and their reactions to acid. Upon reaching his teenage years, he became aware of the fact that he was gay, yet the fantasies he experienced had not the ordidnary fantasies where he would have sex with other teenage boys, but rather his fantasies were that of him having sex with teenage boy dead corpses. The attempt to supress these feelings was futile, instead they kept growing and getting darker and darker. Something the author, his "friend" that put this together, keeps asking himself is where were the adults? He started drinking everywhere, at school even, and it was quite obvious to everyone around Jeff that he was drinking quite heavily, no one seemed to care enough to reach out and help. That his life could have led to better things is a possibility that now we will never know, all because the adults in his life were too engrossed in their own lives to give a damn about his.
I must confess that while reading this graphic novel I had to take a few breaks. Breaks long enough where I would read another novel in between. And this is not because the writing is too complex, quite the contrary, it is simple to understand. More than anyting it was the content which is nothing but somber and filled with an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness that drags the reader down on an abyss from which you can't easily recover unless, like I said, you have taken a break from it. It has taken me longer to read this novel than anything else I have read in a while. Once I would pick it upa again, I breezed through it because, you know, the format lends itself to that, however; like I said before, the content is what leaves the reader emotionally drained.
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