A man with a taste for killing young women finds his world upended by two inconvenient situations with women. One of them is the slightly off-her-rocker best friend of his latest victim who becomes an unwelcome houseguest. The other is a captivating grocery store clerk who makes him reexamine his serial killer lifestyle. And with a setup like that, we’re off to the races, as Graeme Cameron’s 2015 novel Normal proves to be anything but.

Normal takes us for a ride inside the skewed mind of a prolific serial killer living in the English countryside. His latest kill has gone off without a hitch, but his getaway is halted when his victim’s best friend Erica stops to visit the recently deceased. Cornered, the killer knocks her out and brings her home, imprisoning her in a dungeon beneath his garage. Now saddled with the responsibility of caring for her until he can figure out when, where, and how he wants to kill her, our narrator runs errands to further that purpose and meets Rachel, a gorgeous shop girl who can scarcely hide the self-inflicted scars on her arms. The killer juggles two wholly conflicting lives: one as a murderer with a victim-to-be in his basement (who makes herself increasingly at home) and a budding relationship with Rachel that suppresses and confuses his urge to kill. Once the local police start sniffing around—it seems that love makes a serial killer careless—the walls around our nameless protagonist start closing in as he must figure out how to get rid of Erica without killing her.

Normal had me from the very beginning, with a chill-inducing account of a serial killer stalking his prey. From there, Cameron expertly turned up the tension throughout the book, balancing a compelling romance with Rachel, a developing case of Stockholm Syndrome with Erica, and some truly awful crimes and thoughts from the narrator. It’s rare when the protagonist isn’t the hero of the story, even rarer when that feat is pulled off well. One thing you wouldn’t expect is the humor. It was dry and British, and I loved every second of it. There were several moments, inappropriate ones at that, portrayed in a humorous light. Some were laugh-out-loud funny. Cameron never goes for the cheap laughs—nothing gross or overtly sexual—instead working within the comedy of errors that befall our narrator as these two women dominate his life.

Now, because I’m trying to critique this book, I have to come up with a negative, and this is what I got: for a serial killer with some apparent signs of OCD, he gets criminally sloppy. He may be the only one who knows for sure where the bodies are buried, but the slip-ups he makes as the book progresses are amateurish.

Normal is a well-told story that is at times appalling, funny, even touching. I highly recommend it.

Pros: Surprising humor, well-told, quick read.

Cons: Serial killer feels increasingly amateurish.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars.

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