Nowadays I live in Virginia, and October weather can be less consistently inspiring. Not so different from dreaming up novels, really. The Buffalo Butcher was only one of those dreams as recently as June, when idly I began wondering about the thousands of hopeful young women who came to Buffalo in to find employment at the Pan-American Exposition.
For many young ladies, the prospect of a new life—or of finding a good husband—in the big city became a gravitational force. Delving into into some of their stories, I discovered a sorrowful theme—that quite a few of these women found the cost of self-maintenance in the bustling boomtown far exceeded the pittance they were paid as shopgirls, ticket-takers, and hostesses.
Down on their luck and down to their last nickel, they were lured into prostitution. This gave me the first thread of the story. The second thread was a bit of a spooky, Halloween notion. I wondered: what if someone started killing these young prostitutes as the Exposition was in full swing?
And there I had the second thread. But it was the third one that distinguishes this from a Halloween-inspired slasher knockoff. To ready myself to write this kind of novel, I dug into a stack of books about Jack and other serial killers, trying to figure out what made them tick. I gave up on that, heartsick … and concluded that no one really can understand the mind of a being that gets its jollies from taking life.
What I did notice, with what I can only call disgust, was that the great majority of these books glorified the exploits of the killer, to the point of hero-worship; the victims were treated as so much incidental stage-dressing, reduced to nonentities even in death.
