SURVIVAL TIPS FOR SONS OF SERIAL KILLERS
1. Change your last name. Be forgettable.
2. Take comfort. Serial killing is not hereditary. Not usually, anyhow.
3. Never contact your parents, whether on Death Row or elsewhere. You are messed up enough.
4. Choose a dull career. Run an ice cream parlor, for instance.
5. Do not fall in love. Sooner or later, she will ask to meet your mom and dad.
6. Trust no one. Not even her.
7. Do not get married. It cannot end well.
8. Keep what you know to yourself. You were just a kid, after all.
9. Do not return to your boyhood home. No one has forgotten anything.
SURVIVAL TIPS FOR READERS: Watch your back. Lock your doors. Be courteous to everyone. Yes, everyone. This is your only warning.
Praise for The Serial Killer's Son Takes a Wife
"The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife is sharp, funny, thrilling, and endlessly original. Michael Libling gives Riley Sager a run for his money!"—Nicholas Kaufmann, bestselling author of The Hungry Earth and The Stone Serpent
“By turns hilarious and terrifying… all rendered in Libling’s razor-sharp prose and piercing observations of small-town life that build relentlessly to a Grand Guignol finale. It’s the Coen Brothers meet Thomas Harris … and I can’t recommend it enough.”—Lawrence C. Connolly, Nightmare Cinema and Prime Stage Mystery Theatre
"Only a writer as flat-out funny as Michael Libling could remind us that 99% of 'slaughter' is 'laughter.' And only a storyteller with the genius of Michael Libling could somehow, amidst gasps and giggles and plot twists galore, make us care."—Paul Witcover, author of Lincolnstein and many others
“Full of feeling and freakish delights, this is a wild, unpredictable story that will amaze and startle readers by turns. What if Patrick Bateman from American Psycho had been a family man? What would his son be like? Libling answers that question in this terrifying and darkly humorous tale of hereditary horror.”—Ian Rogers, author of Every House Is Haunted
"Michael Libling writes like that affable stranger on the next barstool buying you drinks as he charms you with his stories. Next thing you know, you've woken up in a bathtub full of ice with your kidney missing.”—William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist
“Michael Libling is a brilliant writer. Anyone who’s read his first novel, Hollywood North, knows this already. His second, The Serial Killer’s Son Takes A Wife, is just as brilliant, giving us, as it does, the same breathtaking mix of riveting ideas and heartfelt humanity that makes all of Libling’s work so memorable.”—Bruce McAllister, author of Dream Baby and The Village Sang to the Sea
“The Serial Killer’s Son Takes A Wife raises and answers central questions of anxiety and existence. Libling, a major writer, takes chance after chance and surmounts them all.”—Barry N. Malzberg, author of The Lone Wolf crime series, Bend at the End of the Road, and many others
“The Serial Killer's Son Takes a Wife is a raucous, deceptively dark road trip that tantalizes and twists until it's too late to go back.”—Tanya Gough, author of Root Bound, founder of StoryBilder.com
“What do you call a book that digs into the mind of a serial killer’s son with belly-aching laughs and rapier wit? Wonderful!”—James Ladd Thomas, author of Lester Lies Down and Ardor
“The Serial Killer's Son Takes a Wife by Michael Libling is an experiential and heart-stopping mystery soaked in the supernatural.”— Timothy S. Johnston, author of The Shadow of War
"Michael Libling has a genius for inserting a blade ... the healing surgeon, or the nurse of death?”—Clark Blaise, author of This Time, That Place
Michael Libling is a World Fantasy Award finalist whose short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, and many others. The Serial Killer's Son Takes a Wife is his second novel. His first, Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels, was published in 2019. Creator and former host of the long-running CJAD Trivia Show in Montreal, Michael is the father of three daughters and lives on Montreal's West Island with his wife, Pat, and a big black dog named Piper. Among other things, he claims to be one of only a handful of North American authors who has never owned a cat. You can find out more about him at www.michaellibling.com, where he has been known to blog on occasion.
