My Friend Dahmer

Everyone has a strange classmate whose antics entertained, amused, and perhaps even frightened us in school. The one we remember even after many years. After graduation, no one stays in touch with him; he dissolves in memory, kept alongside old... photo albums and artifacts of adolescence. But sometimes we ponder what happened to him. In the case of one man who grew up in a small town in Ohio, this question was answered by all the media in the world at once. This happened on July 22, 1991, when Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested for the murder of 17 young men and boys. ‘My Friend Dahmer’ is an outstanding graphic novel by Derf Backderf, an award-winning political cartoonist. In these pages, Backderf tries to understand the future serial killer he went to school with, spent time with during breaks, and drove around with. He creates a compassionate portrait of a deeply troubled young man, unsuccessfully battling the horrific desires rising from the dark corners of his soul. Dahmer is viewed worldwide as a inhuman monster, but here he is depicted as a lonely weirdo – even too human. A shy guy, who, with the complete ignorance of the adults around him, was irrevocably pulled into madness. We all know what Dahmer did, but in ‘My Friend Dahmer,’ Backderf offers his unique, compelling, and sometimes oddly humorous arguments about how and, more importantly, why Jeffrey Dahmer transformed from a school oddball into as terrible an enemy of humanity as Jack the Ripper. In ‘My Friend Dahmer,’ Backderf comes closer than anyone before him to unraveling the seemingly inexplicable case of Jeffrey Dahmer, a 1978 graduate of Revere High School.