Subverting the Serial Gaze: Interrogating the Legacies of Intergenerational Violence in Serial Killer Narratives Emily O’Grady Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) Creative Industries: Creative Writing and Literary Studies Queensland University of Technology Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2018 1 Abstract This thesis subverts, disrupts and reimagines dominant narratives of fictional serial crime through a hybrid research paradigm of creative practice and critical analysis. The creative output of this thesis is an 80,000 word literary novel titled The Yellow House, accompanied by a 20,000 word critical exegesis. In the following, I argue that current fictional iterations of the serial killer literary genre are rigidly conservative, and remain fixed within the safe confines of genre conventions wherein the narrative bears little resemblance to how abject violence and the aftermath of serial crime plays out in real life. The broad framework of genre theory, accompanied by trauma theory, allows for an examination of the serial killer genre to identify the space in which my creative practice—an Australian, literary rendering of serial crime—fits as an extension and subversion of the genre. By reimagining the Australian serial killer narrative, I seek to challenge the reductive serial killer genre, and come to a potential offering of serial homicide that interrogates how the legacies of abject violence can be transmitted across generations. I do this by shifting the focus onto the aftermath of the crime and its numerous victims—in particular, the descendants of serial killers. The Yellow House presents a destabilising fictionalisation of serial crime that disrupts the conventions of the genre in order to contend with the complexity and instability of serial homicide. In this research, I use creative practice to illuminate a more authentic and unconsidered narrative that exists in the aftermath of serial crime. 2 Key Words serial murder, serial killer fiction, serial killer genre, intergenerational trauma, creative writing, Australian fiction 3 Statement of Original Authorship The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made. QUT Verified Signature Signature: Date: 14.06.2018 4 Acknowledgements I am grateful to the many people who have helped and supported me throughout the writing of this thesis. I would especially like to thank my principal supervision, Sarah Holland-Batt, for her guidance and mentorship over the last few years. Her interest in and engagement with my work has been of great value to this thesis, and my writing practice in general. Thank you to my associate supervisor, Dr Donna Hancox for her help in shaping the exegesis. Thank you also to the QUT Creative Writing Faculty. I am particularly grateful for the assistance of a QUT Emerging Writers Mentorship and Ian See, whose insights shaped the direction of the manuscript. Thank you to Emma Doolan, for her extensive and thoughtful feedback on the manuscript in draft form, and to the postgraduate students I have worked alongside over the past few years. 5 List of Presentation and Publications 2018. “The Yellow House.” Allen & Unwin. ISBN 978 1 76063285 4. 2018. Winner of the Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award for “The Yellow House.” 2018. “The Yellow House.” Extracted in The Australian (April 14, 2018) 2017. “Not An Isolated Incident: Interrogating the Pattern of Male Violence Against Women in Contemporary Australian Crime Fiction.” Paper presented at Captivating Criminality 4. Crime Fiction: Detection, Public and Private, Past and Present. Bath Spa University, UK 6 Contents Abstract 2 Key Words 3 Statement of Authorship 4 Acknowledgments 5 List of Presentations and Publications 6 Contents 7 Creative Practice: The Yellow House 8 Introduction 211 Definitions 216 Research Question 218 Research Methods 219 Literature Review 221 Textual Analysis Good Me Bad Me by Ali Land 245 An Isolated Incident by Emily Maguire 253 Reflections and Conclusions 265 Reference List 276 7 The Yellow House 8 PROLOGUE Cassie once told me that twins have special powers. He said they can read each other’s thoughts and feel pain in the same spots even if only one of them has been hurt. But that wasn’t true for Wally and me. When Wally tripped in the kitchen and burned his hand on the stovetop I didn’t feel it. When I came off my bike and into the barbed wire surrounding the paddock, Wally laughed like a loon as I hosed the blood off my elbows and knees. I used to send Wally brain messages, secret thoughts I hoped would worm into his mind without using human words anyone could overhear, things I was too embarrassed to say out loud. Later, I realised they never worked—that I was as much a mystery to Wally as he was to me. If we were proper twins, I would’ve been able to latch on to Wally’s brain and know all the things he somehow found out, like magic—all the secret stories he kept from me, just because I was a girl and he liked the feeling of knowing more than I did. Even before I knew anything about Granddad Les—the ugly things he did when he drove trucks up north and back again—Wally and me sometimes dared each other to see how close to the knackery we could get. It was way out in the bottom paddock, and Dad had banned us from going further than the dam. Wally said it was because the whole paddock was haunted. He said he could see ghosts wisping in the grass like sheets blown from the washing line. But even then I knew for sure that was a lie. Our house sat at the edge of the paddock, down a dirt road off the side of the highway. There were no other houses close by, except for the yellow house over the fence. A weatherboard, almost identical to ours except for the colour: the same rickety verandah that looked out over the hilly paddock and the inky mountains on the other side of the highway, the dirt crawl space that rustled like tinsel if you gave the nesting cockies a fright. Les lived in the yellow house before he died, two years before Wally and I were born. When he died, the house became Uncle Dermott’s. Cassie told me that Dermott only came back to town for Les’s funeral, but a few months after me and Wally were born—a few months after the cops searched the paddock— he drove his car into a dam and drowned, still buckled into the driver’s seat. The house sat empty for all that time, until the year we turned eleven. Helena and Tilly moved next door not long after that, and then Ian showed up as well, and before I knew it everything had started to shift and, though I tried, it was 9 impossible to steer things back to how it was. Now, I know that everything was set in stone the moment Les decided to take those girls off the highway, drive them back to the knackery and leave them in the paddock where no one would find what was left of them for years and years. Now, I know everything he did trickled down and created us all, because as it turned out he was the god of all our lives. 10 PART ONE 1. We watched Helena and Tilly from the verandah for almost three days before any of us spoke to them. Dad told us to stop gawking, but even he sometimes stopped on the stairs and watched as they climbed into the Commodore and rattled towards the highway. They came back with mops and brooms, groceries, paper bags from the bakery. ‘I’ll pop round after they’ve settled in,’ Mum said. ‘Invite them over for tea.’ ‘I don’t want them over here,’ Wally said. We were leaning against the railing, and through the gap in the gums that lined the fence we could see Helena bringing in the washing from the Hills hoist, Tilly reading on the steps. ‘She’s spastic,’ Wally said, jerking his chin towards Helena. ‘Look at the way she’s walking.’ Helena had stopped to prop the basket on her hip. When she set off again I saw she moved strangely, like a waddle. ‘She is not,’ Cassie said. ‘They’re weird,’ Wally said. ‘They’re family,’ Mum said. ‘Your aunt and your cousin.’ ‘If they’re family, then why’ve we never met them?’ Wally asked. ‘Why’ve we never even heard of them?’ Aside from Dad, who gave Helena the key when they got here, it was Cassie who spoke to them first. I spied on them through Dad’s binoculars. Helena and Cassie stood on opposite sides of the fence and talked for nearly ten minutes, but really it was Tilly I was watching, as she trailed around the yard, collecting gumnuts in her skirt, which she’d scooped up into a pouch. When it started to spit a little bit, Helena held out her palm and looked to the sky. She stubbed out her smoke on the fence post and turned back to the yellow house, Tilly following. But Cassie stayed out there for ages, even after he’d slipped Helena’s smoke into his pocket, until the rain started to come in sideways, blowing the paddock stalks to yellow velvet. That night after dinner we sat on the back steps while Mum and Dad watched the cricket.