Examples of Serial Killers in Literature:
- The search for a serial killer in New York City in 1896 is the plot of Caleb Carr's The Alienist.
- Patrick Bateman from American Psycho is a sadistic sociopath, although he doesn't fit all of the qualifications. For one thing, he might not have actually killed anyone.
- In Beka Cooper, Deirdry Noll as the Shadow Snake is a comfort/profit killer whose modus operandi is to find an otherwise poor family who has some small item of value (an enamel-on-gold lily pendant, some money, pearl earrings, a spell book, so on), kidnap one of their children, and demand the item in return for the child's life. If the item is not paid up in a week, the Snake kills the child.
- Benny Rose, the Cannibal King: In life, Benny Rose is indicated to have possibly been a cannibalistic serial killer who preyed on kids. Benny is now a supernatural entity of some sort and continues to hunt and devour children.
- Several appear in R.S Belcher's novel The Brotherhood of the Wheel. The first is a mundane serial killer/rapist "The Marquis", a trucker who got his Start of Darkness from finding The 120 Days of Sodom in a truck-stop washroom. Next there's a truck-stop diner that's a hunting lodge for a branch of the "Zodiac Lodge", a cult dedicated towards serial killing and are the actual Zodiac killer, and finally there's "Pagan". Pagan was a psychopathic serial-killer since 200 years ago, he would have been a standard serial-killer but he was unusually attuned to the supernatural world and came under the influence of the Horned God, so he was granted immortality and other powers by Cernunos.
- Bruce Coville's Book of... Spine Tinglers: The author in The Teacher Who Could Hear, who writes a book, kills a teacher and traps their spirit in his newest book, then does it all over again.
- Cassie Dewell: The Big Bad of The Highway Quartet is a serial killer known as 'the Lizard King': a truck driver who preys on truck stop prostitutes. His crimes go undetected for a long time because he uses his occupation to dispose of his victims' bodies far from where he killed them, usually across state lines. And because he is committing his crimes across multiple jurisdictions, the local authorities cannot detect any pattern.
- Cat of Many Tails by Ellery Queen has Ellery being hired as a special investigator to assist the NYPD to catch a serial killer who has been terrorizing New York. Initially, the only pattern Ellery can find in the killer's targets, who vary in sex, race, and marital status, is that each victim is younger than the one before.
- The Cat Who... Series: In book #9 (The Cat Who Went Underground), the murderer is one, whose targets are all local carpenters. And they've been keeping track of them by using lipstick to write the victims' names and the dates of the murders on the wood under Qwill's cabin.
- Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith has one operating in the Soviet Union in the early 1950's. The catch? The killer is the protagonist's brother, Andrei, from whom he was separated as a child. Turns out Andrei was killing his victims the same way that he and his brother killed game for food, in an effort to lure his brother back to him. Not to kill him, just to be with him again. You find out the identity of the killer a while before the end of the book (if you can put the clues together), so it becomes a whydunnit.
- In the Agatha Christie novel The ABC Murders, Hercule Poirot receives a series of letters from 'ABC' threatening to kill a series of victims in alphabetical order and challenging Poirot to unmask him. Alexander Bonaparte Cust is being used as a front by the real killer, who wants to murder his brother for the inheritance and plans to cover it up by disguising it as the act of a serial killer.
- Played straight by Wargrave in And Then There Were None and Yahmose in Death Comes as the End.
- Many of Michael Connelly's mystery novels involve pursuit of a serial killer.
- In The Circle Opens, Tamora Pierce goes the Criminal Minds route of covering a wide swath of the usual serial killer traits (displaying the bodies, murdering surrogates for the killer’s mother, keeping trophies, etc.) while keeping things fairly realistic by splitting them up among multiple killers instead of piling them onto one. Each protagonist helps to solve a series of disturbing crimes across four cities and four books.
- The Corrupted Chronicles of Coco Claramisa features two: the titular character herself, who sets up murders of anybody who ends up being more popular than her, and Bloody Rose, who murders people with depression and leaves a black rose covered in the victim's blood as a Calling Card.
- In Damnatio Memoriae, Enim and Jack are searching for whoever has been killing local girls in the town outside of their boarding school. Enim thinks he finds the killer, but given that he's an Unreliable Narrator, it's hard to know what really happened.
- A savage serial killer plagues the city in Dance of the Butterfly. This is but one of many negative forces motivating the protagonists.
- In part of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, a woman finds herself on a bridge chased by a serial killer called "The Lonely One" who remembers she has a pair of scissors in her purse.
- The mysterious killer of natural redheads called "O Inseto" ("The Insect") in Brazilian's mystery teen novel The Devil's Scarab ("O escaravelho do Diabo").
- Several Discworld books, most prominently Hogfather, give delicate references to the Assassins' Guild's "scholarship boys" — that is, people who made it into Assassin school by proving they were already very good at discreetly killing people. The Guild keeps such scholarships in place not because they approve of indiscriminate slaughter, but because anyone who has a natural aptitude for their kind of work had better damn well be where you can see them.
- The villain in Dove Keeper, Gilles de Rais, is a serial killer of (mostly) children.
- The period mystery Eater of Souls is a serial-killer story set in Ancient Egypt. One of the few cases where the "Visionary" variant of this trope is genuinely and plausibly suspected to be legitimately supernatural by the investigators.
- In Fate/Zero, the historical hero Gilles de Rais (summoned to the war as Caster) is a visionary serial killer (with aspects of a thrill killer) who kills to spite God for abandoning Jeanne d'Arc. He favours children as his targets. His master, Ryuunosuke, is a sadistic thrill killer who ended up summoning Caster out of curiosity and gleefully follows Caster because he considers him an artist.
- Dean Koontz's Frankenstein: Prodigal Son has a subplot about a serial killer called the Surgeon, a Hedonist who harvests body parts from women to piece together his "perfect woman". The reader is made aware of his identity fairly promptly; the real mystery is for him, upon learning that there's a copycat killer who's stalking him.
- Karkas, villain of Galaxy of Fear: The Brain Spiders, is a touchy, mercurial murderer who's killed at least ninety-one people and cut a K into the forehead of each of them.
- Saxon Hyde from Ghoul by Michael Slade, and the Headhunter, among others. All of the author's novels include a Serial Killer at the center of the plot, but also discuss cases of Real Life killers such as Ted Bundy and Ed Gein. Slade is the pseudonym for Jay Clarke, a lawyer who specializes in criminal insanity.
- In the Flannery O’Connor short story "A Good Man Is Hard to Find", a serial killer called "The Misfit" and minions meet up with a family whose matriarch tries to talk her way out, but it does not work out for her.
- "The Hunter" from Gun Machine has over two hundred kills to his name, performed over a series of twenty years, using "appropriate" pre-used guns to kill every target. He is eventually revealed to be a visionary mission killer: the Hunter is a delusional psychotic attempting to make a wampum pattern out of his murder weapons that he believed would kick-start the Ghost Dance and return Manhattan to its pristine pre-colonization state .
- Hannibal Lecter is the definitive serial killer series, in that almost every fictional serial killer since has been inspired by the two examples in the movie.
- Hannibal Lecter himself is a cultural icon. He's a well-educated man, a famous psychiatrist, and a genius who sometimes helps out the protagonists. His cold eyes are the only signs that he is a serial killing cannibal —although in the book (but not the film), he has maroon eyes and six fingers on one hand.
- Francis Dolarhyde from Red Dragon (the first of the Lecter novels) and the movie Manhunter is a gruesome one, complete with scrapbook of newspaper clippings and drawings from when he was a kid, reflecting his Freudian Excuse. Rather than sending taunting letters to the cops, he sent fan letters to the incarcerated Hannibal Lecter himself.
- Buffalo Bill from the second book, The Silence of the Lambs, is a complete maniac who kills and skins five women. Although feminine and very disturbing, he is a fairly generic serial killer. Buffalo Bill is actually a combination of real life serial killers Ted Bundy, Ed Gein, and Gary Heidnik.
- Lord Voldemort of the Harry Potter series. In the last book alone he murders on 4 seperate occasions, not the mention several before the start of the series and Frank Bryce in the fourth book. And that's just the murders that he did himself.
- Oscar Yeager, the protagonist (for lack of a better term) of Hunter (W. L. Pierce), is a white supremacist serial killer, targeting mixed race couples and their children. He later broadens his targets to liberal journalists and government officials and inspires several copycat killers.
- Serial killers are the main subject of I Am Not a Serial Killer. The protagonist, John, is obsessed with true crime, making him conveniently capable of doing his own snooping when a string of murders begins in his hometown. Each book showcases a different killer with different motivations and methods, contrasted with John’s attempts to remain moral. By the middle of the fourth book, John himself qualifies, despite his efforts.
- Gretchen "the Beauty Killer" Lowell, first introduced in Heartsick, has tortured and killed over 200 people, whether alone or by manipulating her lovers into killing for her.
- Heavy Object has Skuld Silent-Third, an apparently kind young girl. She's actually a hedonistic serial killer who likes the befriend her target before personally strangling them to death, often targeting her fellow soldiers. The higher-ups are aware of her proclivities but feel she's worth the high rate of "desertion". Her sisters view it as their duty to keep Skuld in line and on the battlefield as they know she would go on a bloody rampage if she ever got free in a safe country. Over the course of the light novels her tastes evolve, gaining a love of medieval torture and high explosives.
- In The Hellfire Club by Peter Straub, Dick Dart is most definitely this, despite how much he hates being called this by the media.
- A staple of the In Death series from the first book, Naked In Death, which features a serial murderer of Disposable Sex Workers. This turns out to be not quite a straight example — the first killing was unplanned and personal, and the other murders were committed by a different person to cover up the first by framing it as the work of a serial. However, NYPSD psychiatrist and profiler Dr. Mira has no doubts that, now that he's gotten a taste for it, the murder will absolutely find excuses to kill again. Over the following 52 novels and novellas in the series, Eve has gone up against nearly every type on the list.
- No actual serial killer appears in Into the Hinterlands, but Destry borrows techniques used to investigate them such as geographic profiling in an attempt to analyze patterns in Rider raids on settlements and locate their encampments.
- James Bond:
- Grant from From Russia with Love has urges to kill during the full moon and started working for the Soviets to be able to continue to do so. He became a SMERSH agent, and they use him as their chief executioner.
- The Big Bad of Never Send Flowers is a serial killer who specializes in arranging high-profile assassinations.
- JLA Exterminators: Martian Manhunter and Bryan Francis track down a man who has been murdering homeless people for the past several months.
- Kafka on the Shore, by Haruki Murakami, has a strange example: a character known as Johnny Walker (very strongly implied if not proven to be the dad of the main character, Kafka.) Why is it strange? Instead of people, he kills cats, and eats their hearts.
- King of the Road, the sequel to The Brotherhood of the Wheel above, has the Harlequins — a cult of clown-themed serial killers who use alchemically treated face paint. They've been killing and dismembering countless victims for centuries and the latest incarnation is influenced by Juggalo culture to the point where the Harlequins have their own knock-off group, the "Lunatic Clown Squad". The hidden goal of the Harlequins is to harvest enough pineal glands from their victims to create the Azoth.
- Mr. Harvey from The Lovely Bones, for a pedophilic example.
- Martin Vanger from the Millennium Series defies all stereotypes and all rules on top of this page. He is the kindly CEO of a corporation, a nice but troubled guy, and a friend who even saves the protagonist's life. He's also a serial killer who has been imprisoning, raping, and murdering hundreds of young Russian girls. This has been going on since he was a teenager. The most chilling thing is Martin's explanation for his actions: "This is every man's innermost dream. I take whatever I want."
- The Roman Empire setting of the Marcus Didius Falco novels might strike some as an odd place for a serial killer, but Three Hands in the Fountain has one anyway. Then again, the thoroughly modern sensibility of the series makes it work.
- Annie Wilkes from Misery is an "Angel of Death" example. She was a nurse, and killed many old patients, and later, babies in the hospitals she worked in.
- Mr. Fox by Helen Oyeyemi has the title character, a charming, wealthy aristocrat who is revealed to have killed hundreds of young women that he keeps in a chamber in his estate.
- Set in modern-day Nigeria, My Sister, the Serial Killer starts with beautiful Ayoola calling her responsible older sister Korede to help her clean up after the third time she kills a boyfriend, claiming he left her with no other choice. During the course of the novel, she kills her fourth and introduces a potential future number six. As for number five, he survives but she still manages to ruin his life.
- Nadia Stafford:
- Exit Strategy: The Helter Skelter killer is a Serial Killer who is framing his murders as the work of the son of Charles Manson, even leaving notes from the Helter Skelter book about Manson and his followers.
- Wild Justice: Sebastian Koss is a monstrous sociopath who preys on young girls. Koss uses his position as a trusted community member to scout for victims and than rapes and murders them.
- Two stories in Stephen King's Night Shift features a serial killer: "Springheel Jack" in Strawberry Spring and the hammer murderer in The Man who Loved Flowers. In both, the protagonist is the killer; in the former it's a case of The Killer in Me, in the latter an extreme example of Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick.
- No Gods for Drowning: The Valentine Butcher is a serial killer who's stalking the streets of Valentine and ritualistically killing people. This killer is the Villain Protagonist Lilac Antonis, who is killing people as a Human Sacrifice to her mother, the goddess Logoi, in an attempt to bring her back to the city to save it from destruction.
- In On the Street Where You Live, it becomes evident that a serial killer is operating in Spring Lake, fatally strangling a young woman every few years to match up with the disappearances of three young women back in the 1890s (who were also apparently victims of a serial killer). Based on his modus operandi, the police and media predict that the killer will strike again by the end of March.
- Colin Wilson explores the nature of the seemingly motiveless serial killer in his work of criminology, Order of Assassins.
- The Origin of Laughing Jack: After smashing the head of the woman who refused his advances, Isaac spends weeks crafting her body into a chair and repurposing his workshop into a murder nest. Then he kidnaps a boy to torture him before killing him. His next "guests" are a blind old woman and a young girl. He's had several victims over the span of several weeks before he meets his own bloody end at Laughing Jack's hands.
- John Dread, from Tad Williams' Otherland series, was raised by a violent, drug-addicted mother who fulfilled her revenge fantasies against the world by intentionally turning him into a sociopath. He started killing as early as 6, was moved from institution to institution and deemed "incorrigible", and finally escaped into society after Corrupt Corporate Executive Felix Jongleur noticed his abnormal psychic powers and began training him as a Psycho for Hire. He murders women for pleasure in fetishistic ways (acting out a Revenge Fic against his mother) and records all the killings in his private video library. He taunts the police by leaving bizarre clues at the scene and "fogging" security cameras with his "twist". He chafes at Jongleur's leash, and eventually breaks free by infiltrating the heroes' group in Otherland and discovering how to break the network's security, upon which point he proves how Eviler than Thou he is by going on a godlike killing spree.
- Throughout the events of Perdido Street Station, there's background snippets of reports about a serial killer who's been murdering people to steal their eyes before dumping their bodies in the city's waterways. It's heavily implied that said serial killer doesn't really exist. When the New Crobuzon militia captures Benjamin Flex, they interrogate him and than kill him to keep him from spilling any information. The next day, Flex's body is found dumped in a river with his eyes cut out; the official investigation releases a report that the killer has struck again, hinting that the serial killer angle is just a cover story, made to help hide the militia's experiments with the slakemoths.
- Primal Warrior Draco Azul: Varukan—aka Balthazar—is a hedonistic alien serial killer who preys on sentient life, and is introduced in the short story "A Friend from Afar" sadistically massacring a group of women who he seduces using his human disguise. When Eric begins investigating alongside the alien bounty hunter José, he discovers that Varukan has been using the city as a hunting ground for some time and been leaving bits and pieces of his victims scattered all over. When confronted, Varukan tells Eric that he's a simple monster who merely wants to indulge in all of life's pleasures, which for him means torturing and devouring his victims while they're still alive so he can enjoy their screams, and that the appearance of the Diablos has provided the perfect cover to go on a feeding frenzy.
- The David Eddings novel Regina's Song has the Seattle Slasher, a killer who paralyzes sexual predators with a syringe of curare and then carves them to pieces with a linoleum knife. She was a Mission/Revenge type, targeting sex offenders because one of them raped and murdered her twin sister, and ultimately seeking out and killing the specific rapist responsible for that act.
- Malty S. Melromarc from The Rising of the Shield Hero is a spoiled princess with a compulsive need to lie, and often gets rid of men by accusing them of trying to rape her. While this is bad in itself, her Kingdom of Melromarc is a matriarchy and any crime against a woman is punishable by death. This makes Malty a killer by proxy. Her latest victim, Naofumi Iwatami, was spared of this because he's one of the four heroes needed to fight the monster wave. She is the antisocial and hedonistic category of killer.
- Roderick Whittle, aka Jack the Ripper, from Richard Laymon's Savage.
- Semiosis: Three people on the human space colony of Pax are sadistically killed, forcing Tatiana to investigate the colony's first serial murderer. It turns out to be Jersey, who was driven to it by compulsive thoughts from a serious brain infection and is desperate not to hurt her family instead.
- In Diagnosis: Murder book "The Silent Partner", The Silent Partner is a serial killer who committed many murders, each mimicking the MO of a different serial killer.
- A rare Filipino version in Alex Carlos from Smaller & Smaller Circles. He is also a Depraved Dentist and uses his dental tools to kill and eviscerate his victims, usually young boys from slum areas.
- In Stationery Voyagers, Clandish Consto
toys around with the idea of making a career out of being a Serial Killer. Then, he decides to become a full-blown terrorist instead (with plans to become a god). - The Stranger Beside Me is a True Crime novel about Ted Bundy (mentioned below). Some women are gonna die.
- The first story that featured the infamous demon barber Sweeney Todd, The String of Pearls, had Sweeney murdering his customers by means of a barber's chair rigged to send people down to his basement, taking his razor to any who survived the fall, then delivering the bodies to Mrs. Lovett's pie shop across the street through a tunnel below to be made into pies. Sweeney was not motivated by vengeance like in the musical, but money. The story is a lot less romantic or melodramatic than the musical, and it ends with the two getting caught, Mrs. Lovett poisoning herself before the trial after almost getting lynched by her customers during her arrest, and Sweeney himself being tried, convicted, and hanged for his crimes. Note that Sweeney does share this trope's tendency to keep "trophies", as Tobias finds his house to be crammed with victims' clothing and other personal possessions.
- The Serge Storms novels have Serge A Storms, who goes on spree killings whenever he's off his meds (Read: Every single book). Some people he kills in the pursuit of wealth, and others he kills purely because they offend him, usually for some sort of anti-social behavior (unsportsman like conduct at a Little League game, playing music too loud...) or for damaging some part of Florida history. A great deal of the humor in the stories comes from the truly inventive ways he can come up with to off people.
- When the Angels Left the Old Country: The demonic doctor at Ellis Island is revealed to be a serial killer, especially of other demons.
