Book Review: My Friend Dahmer, by Derf Backderf

I grew up in a hippy family, so there were always weird left wing newspapers that ran Derf Backderf's comic The City in them. The stiffly drawn (but deceptively difficult) artstyle is immediately distinctive, and I developed quite the fondness for the comic strip over the years. So when I stumbled across a graphic novel by Derf Backderf about his high school experience growing up with Jeffery Dahmer, I bought it on the spot.

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Any narrative about a serial killer like Jeffery Dahmer is going to be disturbing, but My Friend Dahmer is disturbing in an entirely unexpected manner. This isn't a recounting of Dahmer's crimes- there are plenty of those out there. In fact, only the first murder is even really talked about, and nothing overly graphic are shown. Instead, this is a story of the years leading up to Dahmer's crimes- a weird, alcoholic, but not obviously dangerous high school student trying to find a place for himself. The disturbing thing about this book is how human Dahmer seems- he's not some inhuman monster, but an entirely human monster, who battled with himself for years with his darkness, and eventually failed.

My Friend Dahmer is a coming of age story interwoven with a descent into madness story, and it's all the more powerful for the ways the story falls flat- because they remind you that this isn't a well written piece of fiction, but real life, and real life doesn't always translate well into story. In a story, the epic prank spree at the mall would end in a grand finale or serious consequences. Here? It just kinda fizzles out as people lose interest.

What really gives My Friend Dahmer resonance is the relative innocence of the author and his friends in their teenage years. Derf Backderf had absolutely no idea growing up that Dahmer would eventually become a serial killer. There were a few off color jokes made about the idea, but they were just silly jokes made by young men- no one took them seriously. Backderf never once claims any sort of prescience, never tries to illustrate himself as an unheeded Cassandra. He was just a high school kid who sometimes hung out with a weird kid named Jeff who would make weird noises and faces for others' entertainment.

While there was a film made out of My Friend Dahmer, I haven't seen it, so can't comment on its quality. The graphic novel, however, is brilliant, and I can't recommend it enough.