Murderland: Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers

Caroline Fraser is an award-winning writer and literary critic best known for her biographies and her work on environmental issues. Born in 1963 and raised in Seattle, Washington, Caroline Fraser was living in the Pacific Northwest while the murder sprees she describes in Murderland were taking place. Fraser attended college in Los Angeles, California, before completing a PhD in English and American literature from Harvard University. She briefly worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker and has contributed articles to The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Review of Books.

Fraser is best known for her 2017 book Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a comprehensive biography of the author of the Little House on the Prairie series. The biography situates Wilder’s life within the broader context of US history, including westward expansion, environmental change, and political currents in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2018, Fraser was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography for Prairie Fires. Like Murderland, Prairie Fires combines biography and environmental research. Fraser challenges the idyllic vision of life on the Great Plains that the Little House on the Prairie series portrays, showing how the family’s self-sufficiency would have been essentially impossible given the area’s harsh conditions, resource scarcity, and rapid demographic change. Although Wilder’s work is generally considered realism, Fraser places it outside that genre, tracing its idealization of prairie life to Wilder’s upbringing in a struggling Midwestern family, during which the family moved several times while trying to establish a successful homestead.

Fraser’s first book, God’s Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church (1999), is a critical examination of the Christian Science faith, in which she was raised. In the first half of the book, Fraser interrogates the controversies associated with the founding of the Church of Christ, Scientist (built in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1879) and looks at the life of the church’s founder, Mary Baker Eddy (who also founded The Christian Science Monitor and authored several books, most notably the 1875 work Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures). The second half of God’s Perfect Child examines the church’s attempts to cover up the deaths of children in Christian Scientist families and the alleged mismanagement of Church funds. Child deaths in families following the Christian Science faith ostensibly resulted from the Church’s preference for faith healing, teaching families to rely solely on prayer rather than seek necessary medical treatment when children were gravely ill (as detailed on the Massachusetts Citizens for Children website). Regarding financial mismanagement in the Christian Science Church, the most notable instance relates to “allegations that up to $80 million in pension funds were used to keep [the Church’s] broadcasting and publishing activities afloat” (“Christian Scientists name new church leader,” UPI Archives, 10 March 1992). Murderland contains echoes of these criticisms, as Fraser grapples with her father’s devotion to the Church’s teachings.