Erik B.K.K.'s Reviews > Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Whatever Ted is doing in Hoquiam is Ted’s business, but he always buys gas when he’s hunting...


Murderland is the perfect book for feverish, endless summer nights. It will end up as one of the best and most memorable books I've read in 2025. It's so grand, so elaborate, so far-reaching and well researched, never dense or dull, not so much a True Crime book, but a book on the Zeitgeist of the Serial Killer Era, starting in the 60s, throughout the 70s, 80s and ending in the mid 90s. It's a history on the PNW, on Post-War blue-collar America, and on an entire generation being poisoned by corporate murderers, being the smelter and mine companies that cash Big Blood Money over the backs of children and workers knowingly. Nothing is left out. Ted Bundy, Waco, Charles Manson, Galloping Gertie, Mt. St. Helens, Dennis Rader, Watergate, The Guggenheims, The Kennedys... and many more life and world altering events and people, dispersed with compelling bits about the author's own life growing up as the same generation. Caroline Fraser doesn't spare you any tough, gruesome details, but it never becomes sensational or disrespectful (to the victims). I loved her writing style. I wished it would never end. It could have been 300 pages longer and I would have been more than okay with that. Fraser posits a compelling and believable theory on how steady poisoning of lead and arsenic, among other metals and poisonous gasses, lead to the obscene surge of violent crimes and serial killers. I think she's really on to something. That combined with the anonymous, far-stretched back countries and highways of the West Coast, and also the general attitude of the people, the poverty, and the politics from the 50s until the 00s.

An "atmospheric" book, honestly that should be a genre of its own.

Murderland reminds me of a few other books that tackle such a widespread subject and read like a special treat: Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi, The Baader-Meinhof Complex by Stefan Aust and A Fever in the Heartland by Timothy Egan. Books that tried to emulate the same feeling but failed in varying degree: The Nineties by Chuck Klostermann (alright) and Nixonland by Rick Perlstein (bad). But if you loved any of the first 3, you will love Murderland...