My Friend Dahmer

You only think you know this story. In 1991, Jeffrey Dahmer��he most notorious serial killer since Jack the Ripper��eared himself into the American consciousness. To the public, Dahmer was a monster who committed unthinkable atrocities. To Derf Backderf, ��eff��was a much more complex figure: a high school friend with whom he had shared classrooms, hallways, and car rides. In My Friend Dahmer, a haunting and original graphic novel, writer-artist Backderf creates a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of a disturbed young man struggling against the morbid urges emanating from the deep recesses of his psyche�� shy kid, a teenage alcoholic, and a goofball who never quite fit in with his classmates. With profound insight, what emerges is a Jeffrey Dahmer that few ever really knew, and one readers will never forget.

Praise for My Friend Dahmer:

��he tone is sympathetic and enraged ('Where were the damn adults?'), while not excusing or making the story unduly fascinating. Backderf's writing is impeccably honest in not exculpating his own misdeeds . . . and quietly horrifying. A small, dark classic.����I>Publishers Weekly (starred review)

�� powerful, unsettling use of the graphic medium to share a profoundly disturbing story.�. . . An exemplary demonstration of the transformative possibilities of graphic narrative.�����I>Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

��� well-told, powerful story. Backderf is quite skilled in using comics to tell this tale of a truly weird and sinister 1970s adolescent world.��BR>��. Crumb

��nyone who opens My Friend Dahmer to satisfy a morbid curiosity, and likewise anyone who expects to find no more than a cynical publishing venture here, is bound for disappointment. It is a horrifying read, yes, not so much for what it reveals about the sad early (and inevitably terrible) life of Jeffrey Dahmer, but because of what it reveals about the bland emotional landscape of Middle America, in this vision a petri dish for psychoses in many degrees and forms.

Backderf's odd stylization, with figures that look like organic robots, is a perfect vehicle for this conception. His graphic approach is grotesque, droll, and it rags on reality as masses of kids knew and still know it.

Lots of books exist about the agonies and cruelty of the adolescent high school experience, but few so compellingly bring us straight into that soulless environment, showing the ways it can shelter, allow to burgeon, and, at the same time, be completely blind to real madness.

It wasn't easy reading this book, but I'm glad I did.��/P>

��avid Small, author and illustrator of Stitches, a National Book Award finalist and #1 New York Times bestseller

�

��tunning. Horrifying. Beautifully done.��/P>

��lison Bechdel, author and illustrator of Fun Home, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist

�

��I>My Friend Dahmer is a brilliant graphic novel and surely ranks among the very best of the form. Like Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, the book plumbs a dark autobiographical mystery, trying in retrospect to understand actions and motivations to piece together the makings of a tragedy. Like Charles Burns's Black Hole, it's a starkly etched portrait of the horror of high school in\ the 1970s. Comparisons aside, My Friend Dahmer is entirely original, boldly and beautifully drawn, and full of nuance and complexity and even a strange tenderness. Out of the sordid and grotesque details of Da