Book Review: The Last Victim

The Last Victim
Jason Moss
Warner Books

scribbled by LM Campbell

The Last Victim was originally researched by a teen trying to demystify the serial killer, but instead it ended up as a dissection of the serial killer aficionado. Jason Moss began corresponding with an A-list of true-crime celebrities (Dahmer, Lucas, Manson, Ramirez & Gacy) after studying them enough to assume the role of that killer’s preferred victim. All had their particularly fascinating idiosyncrasies and interests, but to Jason, John Wayne Gacy was his holy grail. While the book is somewhat successful at presenting the perversities of some killers, its obliviousness to its own hypocrisy is what makes it such a fun read. As hard as Jason tries to sound condemning, you can sense his reverence written between the lines. He is fascinated with people who kill. Who isn’t? If you put it into perspective everyone wins when a serial killer is loose: the killer gets to do what he loves most; the police get to beat confessions out of innocent people; the prosecutor will take another step up the ladder to senator or possibly governor by using the case as part of a platform on the reinstitution of the death penalty; and the families of the victims will learn to cherish life more (and won’t have to worry about remembering their sons or daughters birthday, anniversary etc.).

Anyhoo, Jason begins an intimate friendship with the killer clown JWG, all the while assuring himself that he is playing Gacy; filled with youthful hubris, Jason does not realize that it is him that is getting played. Without knowing it Jason (almost?) became the master manipulator’s last victim; of all the murderers Jason became close to, Gacy was the one with whom he became inextricably bound. Their personal relationship/friendship climaxes in a tete-a-tete in an unsupervised holding cell. The Last Victim diagnoses everything wrong with a society fascinated by men who kill for reasons other than revenge or monetary gain; it is no better than any other true crime mass-market paperback lining the shelves