Book Review: The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife

Michael Libling writes like that affable stranger on the next barstool buying you drinks as he charms you with his stories. Next thing you’ve woken up in an ice bath without a kidney.

The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife
by Michael Libling
348 pp.
WordFire Press
September 4, 2023

Photo by Wedding Photography on Unsplash. Photo manipulation by William Shunn.

The Canadian writer Michael Libling is one of my closest friends (though, reading this, he will probably shake his head sadly and tell me I need to get out more). I point this out now because when I tell you about his latest novel, The Serial Killer’s Son Takes a Wife, you may picture him as a hard-bitten, hard-drinking, tatted-up ghoul who mixes his own blood into a human-skull inkpot. In real life, like most horror writers I know, he’s one of the nicest, most self-effacing folks out there.

I first met Michael in July 2002 at a KGB Literary Bar reading where I was appearing as the undercard for China Miéville (and that’s a whole different story). I read a science-fiction-flavored section of my memoir-then-in-progress, set in Calgary. As an interested Canadian, Michael struck up a conversation with me afterward…