Kill for Love

by Laura Picklesimer

Overview

The boys on the row are only after one thing, but that bullshit’s for pledges. Tiffany’s on the hunt for something more. 

Kill for Love is a searing satirical thriller about Tiffany, a privileged Los Angeles sorority sister who is struggling to keep her sadistic impulses—and haunting nightmares of fire and destruction—at bay. After a frat party hookup devolves into a bloody, fatal affair, Tiffany realizes something within her has awoken: the insatiable desire to kill attractive young men. 

As Tiffany’s bloodlust deepens and the bodies pile up, she must contend with mounting legal scrutiny, social media-fueled competing murders, and her growing relationship with Weston, who she thinks could be the perfect boyfriend. A female-driven, modern-day American Psycho, Kill for Love exposes modern toxic plasticity with dark comedy and propulsive plot. 

“In her clear and visceral sentences that evoke a world both like and unlike our own, Picklesimer places you completely in the narrator’s haunting, singular journey.” —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781951213893
Publisher:	The Unnamed Press
Publication date:	09/12/2023
Pages:	244
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Laura Picklesimer’s fiction has been featured in the Santa Ana River Review, Bookwoman, Gold Man Review, the Pomona Valley Review and the California Current Writers Series, among other publications. She was the grand prize winner of Enizagam Journal’s 2018 Fiction Contest (judged by acclaimed author Rachel Khong), won third place in the 2021 Rougarou Fabulism & Speculative Fiction Contest, received third place in the Women’s National Book Association’s 2018 YA Fiction Contest, and was a finalist for the 2018 Speculative Literature Foundation Diverse Worlds Grant. Laura earned a creative writing degree from UCLA and an MFA from Cal State Long Beach. She teaches English and creative writing at Chaffey College. 

Editorial Reviews

06/26/2023

Love’s got little to do with this razor-sharp debut, a darkly comic, gender-swapped take on American Psycho led by L.A. sorority sister Tiff Ames. With unlimited cash and clout courtesy of her deceased business mogul dad, the blonde influencer/fifth-year college senior has everything but feels nothing. That is, until what starts as another desultory hookup at a frat party climaxes in her first kill. “Tearing into Tristan had been how YouTube unboxings were supposed to feel,” Tiff muses. “That rush where you surprise yourself and feel completed, whole. Alive.” Instantly addicted, the fledgling killer (who preemptively retains counsel to deflect any potential questioning) sets her sights on potential prey beyond fraternity row, varying her preferred quarry (buff blond dudes) with random “clean kills” as needed. As the body count mounts and the handiwork of copycats across the region helps to obscure Tiff’s tracks, she meets Weston, a hunky, Ivy League–educated finance manager she quickly convinces herself could be The One. Though the author never takes her foot off the gas, the plot—and numbing video game–level death toll—is less satisfying than the novel’s consideration of class and gender in a social media–driven era even more desolately consumerist than the 1980s. This disruptive debut heralds Picklesimer as a newcomer to watch. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

In her clear and visceral sentences that evoke a world both like and unlike our own, Picklesimer places you completely in the narrator’s haunting, singular journey.” —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin 

"Kill for Love scorches and scalds like a late-summer LA wildfire. Alongside her heroine, Tiffany, Picklesimer peels back the city's beautiful skin to reveal the brute forces required to maintain its shiny surfaces, and the result is as nakedly violent as it is dazzlingly compelling. This book will fuck you up... and you will fucking love it." —Zan Romanoff, author of Look

"Kill for Love weaves a darkly comedic tale of privilege and power set against the ever-present dangers Los Angeles faces with increasing intensity each year. Tiffany is captivating and wonderfully terrifying. —Lisa Glatt, author of The Nakeds

"A tonal blend of Promising Young Woman and American Psycho, Picklesimer's electric narrative masterfully combines propulsive genre pulp with incisive prose that dissects societal-imposed gender norms and subverts all expectations of what a female antihero can be." —Peter Malone Elliott

From the Publisher

2023-06-21
A Los Angeles sorority girl finds fulfillment as a serial killer in Picklesimer’s bloody, satiric debut.

Bored with manicures and the attentions of boorish young men, and trying not to think about the pleasures of a juicy In-N-Out burger, increasingly psychopathic narrator Tiffany realizes that the only thing she really wants to do when a date takes her home is to stab him with a knife she finds conveniently left on a cutting board. That and consume a Pabst and a leftover chicken leg. The satisfaction this gives her leads to more slaughter, involving both guys she can rationalize deserve the punishment and those who are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. While she’s temporarily satisfied with a budding relationship with an older, richer suitor, he soon proves to be disappointingly human and less than totally addicted to her: When she looks through the windows of his house when he’s supposedly on a business trip and catches him watching TV and eating junk food, the romance takes a turn for the worse. Perhaps because Tiffany is too narcissistic to see anyone else as fully human, the other characters come across as more cartoonish than three-dimensional. These include the lawyer trying to maintain plausible deniability about Tiffany’s actions, the sweet roommate who may just be following in Tiffany's footsteps, the sorority “goody-goody” who is always insisting that Tiffany obey the rules, and the male psychopath who might give Tiffany a run for her money. Although the novel sometimes seems more outline for a screenplay than fully articulated work of fiction, and while it definitely isn't for the squeamish, it cunningly draws its premise out to its logical extreme and finds a convenient target in LA’s fitness and wellness culture.

Neatly flips the formula of the male serial killer on its bashed-in head.

Kirkus Reviews