Sorry, you must be a member of this group to do that.
He had been aware before now that there were people in the world who were driven to acquire such macabre things, and that there were even thriving online marketplaces dedicated to the activity. But he had never before stood in the heart of such a collection.
‘Murderabilia’, as it’s called, is a real thing. There are people who collect and trade items associated with crimes and killers, and some of those items can change hands for substantial sums of money. I’ve always been intrigued by what might drive a person’s interest in such things. Is it the feeling of touching darkness from a safe distance? A fascination with a particular crime such that it demands a tangible connection to it? Or simply the desire to possess a rare object – the same as any other collector, albeit with the item’s provenance adding an extra frisson of danger?
Perhaps it’s some mixture of all three. Regardless, there’s another aspect that interests me just as much, which is the forbidden, underground nature of the whole business. I’ve long been drawn to stories that deal with secret knowledge: tales of rare and rumoured items that you shouldn’t seek out because they might be dangerous for you to find, but which some people are drawn to search for anyway. I keep coming back to it, and there’s a focus on that in my third book (The Angel Maker in the US; The Half Burnt House in the UK), which deals with the search for a semi-mythical book written by a serial killer. And I’m sure I’ll return to it again in the future, at least in some capacity. I mean, we all like crime fiction, don’t we? So it’s not so strange. Secrets and darkness are our common currency.
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