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Killing time: two young novelists offer compelling portraits of serial murderers--one skin-crawlingly odd, the other surprisingly sympathetic. (on Books).

Article Excerpt
AS THOUGH THEY WERE VYING to be the poster children of Texas summer fiction, serial killers are front and center in a pair of smartly rendered novels from Lubbock's Stephen Graham Jones and Austinite Amanda Eyre Ward. Equally moving in different ways, Jones's wild-eyed thriller and Ward's tale of grief and forgiveness occupy entirely opposite ends of the literary spectrum.

Stephen Graham Jones never intended to go to college. "I only took the SAT exam so I could give this girl a ride," he says. "She had potential. I had a truck." And if he hadn't wrenched his back moving one of those big double-door refrigerators, he might still be the only Ph.D. hauling appliances at the Sears warehouse in Lubbock's South Plains Mall. The forced layoff led him to pursue a teaching gig at Texas Tech University, and now the 31-year-old assistant professor of English has published his second novel, All the Beautiful Sinners (Rugged Land). A hard-edged, cerebral spine-tingler, it is a portrait of a serial kidnapper-killer with a seventeen-year record stretching from the East Coast to Texas and Oklahoma. The question at hand: How could one man escape capture for so long?

Two manhunts provide the action at...