John, whose name evokes the real-life Illinois “Killer Clown” John Wayne Gacy, is fascinated by the murders, an amateur Sherlock Holmes who sees things that the local police miss. Yet death is close at hand, stalking the streets of the miserable midwest town of Clayton, where an animalistic killer is stealing people’s organs and leaving a trail of sticky black goo.
“But you’re in control of your own destiny,” Karl Geary’s Dr Neblin assures John hollowly. “People are afraid of things, but they’re never afraid of their own actions.” Not so John Wayne Cleaver, the serial killer-obsessed teenager whose therapist agrees that he exhibits all three of the “ Macdonald triad” predictors of violent sociopathy. “F ear is a really weird thing,” says the antihero of this scalpel-sharp, blackly comic adaptation of Dan Wells’s 2009 YA bestseller.
