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A review by mayonessa
My Pet Serial Killer by Michael J. Seidlinger
2.0
Rating: 2.5 stars
I want to start off by saying I bought this book because I really liked the cover and I liked the short bit of premise that Amazon provided. I got overhyped about it and bought it right before COVID hit and then never touched it until recently. At one point I was so anxious to start it that I tried to get through the other books on my TBR list so that I could finally read it myself. Then I found myself anxious to just finish the book, not out of interest to know the ending but to finally be done with it.
I know there is a specific subset of people who will love it, and unfortunately I was not one of them. Which is very disappointing because I rarely, if EVER, end up disliking the books I read. However, the biggest problem with My Pet Serial Killer is that the book should have ended in the first half. If it ended like that I would say that the story would be a lot more enjoyable to me as a reader, a lot less frustrating, and it would have been a much better execution of its themes than the entire second half of the book. Whatever that was.
Plus after a while, the prose style gets exhausting with the more characters that are introduced. It becomes less literarily artistic and more of a hindrance to the reader's comprehension. I had to force myself to finish the ladder half of the book even though I was exhausted reading it. It was novel in the first 250 pages and I enjoyed being initially challenged, but then it just dragged on for too long and made certain areas and plot points of the book too abstract to understand.
The amount of belief suspension the author begged us to do while reading was kind of criminal for a book that is apparently supposed to "reinvent the serial killer genre". I think my biggest issue was more personal to me. But, I WAS a Forensic Science major, and everything pertaining to that field and its presence in the book is so laughably incorrect I just had to tell myself that it wasn't the author's fault. He did what was "best" for the story. And yet, the best was not good enough in the end to save it for me.
Claire was probably the most obnoxious part of the whole story and ultimately the main reason I didn't like it. I understand it takes a good author to write a well-rounded character that is despicable and well hated, but Claire wasn't any of that. She was just cringe. Every thought, every sentence this character said was really aggravating. She felt less like some super sexy, powerful, manipulative, evil Dom that the author desperately wanted us to view her as and more so like some white bitch I went to college with that thought she was smarter than everyone else because she "wasn't like other girls" and read shit like Rand or Chomsky.
A lot of times her dialogue in the book made me feel like she was the mary sue of some weird gore-porn fic written by some edge-lord teenage boy who spends too much time on 4chan, rather than an actualized written character who just happened to be a female serial killer.
And I get that's overly harsh, but personally I just could not get over how annoying she was to read (since she was the only POV we got). Especially when, in-universe the world just bends to her command. The biggest issue I have with My Pet is she does not face any consequences, and unlike other similar characters and more famous "antiheroes" she rarely if ever gets close to any sort of tangible danger. There is no suspense in this book since Claire never gets close to being caught. There is no reward in the end when everything goes her way cause there was never anything diametrically opposed to her other than the occasional whisper of law enforcement in the background.
This book is definitely perfect for a certain type of reader, but that reader was not me.
I want to start off by saying I bought this book because I really liked the cover and I liked the short bit of premise that Amazon provided. I got overhyped about it and bought it right before COVID hit and then never touched it until recently. At one point I was so anxious to start it that I tried to get through the other books on my TBR list so that I could finally read it myself. Then I found myself anxious to just finish the book, not out of interest to know the ending but to finally be done with it.
I know there is a specific subset of people who will love it, and unfortunately I was not one of them. Which is very disappointing because I rarely, if EVER, end up disliking the books I read. However, the biggest problem with My Pet Serial Killer is that the book should have ended in the first half. If it ended like that I would say that the story would be a lot more enjoyable to me as a reader, a lot less frustrating, and it would have been a much better execution of its themes than the entire second half of the book. Whatever that was.
Plus after a while, the prose style gets exhausting with the more characters that are introduced. It becomes less literarily artistic and more of a hindrance to the reader's comprehension. I had to force myself to finish the ladder half of the book even though I was exhausted reading it. It was novel in the first 250 pages and I enjoyed being initially challenged, but then it just dragged on for too long and made certain areas and plot points of the book too abstract to understand.
The amount of belief suspension the author begged us to do while reading was kind of criminal for a book that is apparently supposed to "reinvent the serial killer genre". I think my biggest issue was more personal to me. But, I WAS a Forensic Science major, and everything pertaining to that field and its presence in the book is so laughably incorrect I just had to tell myself that it wasn't the author's fault. He did what was "best" for the story. And yet, the best was not good enough in the end to save it for me.
Claire was probably the most obnoxious part of the whole story and ultimately the main reason I didn't like it. I understand it takes a good author to write a well-rounded character that is despicable and well hated, but Claire wasn't any of that. She was just cringe. Every thought, every sentence this character said was really aggravating. She felt less like some super sexy, powerful, manipulative, evil Dom that the author desperately wanted us to view her as and more so like some white bitch I went to college with that thought she was smarter than everyone else because she "wasn't like other girls" and read shit like Rand or Chomsky.
A lot of times her dialogue in the book made me feel like she was the mary sue of some weird gore-porn fic written by some edge-lord teenage boy who spends too much time on 4chan, rather than an actualized written character who just happened to be a female serial killer.
And I get that's overly harsh, but personally I just could not get over how annoying she was to read (since she was the only POV we got). Especially when, in-universe the world just bends to her command. The biggest issue I have with My Pet is she does not face any consequences, and unlike other similar characters and more famous "antiheroes" she rarely if ever gets close to any sort of tangible danger. There is no suspense in this book since Claire never gets close to being caught. There is no reward in the end when everything goes her way cause there was never anything diametrically opposed to her other than the occasional whisper of law enforcement in the background.
This book is definitely perfect for a certain type of reader, but that reader was not me.