the rise of female killer books and why women love them
#womeninmalefields
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but a lot of the books that are getting hyped up right now as “feminist” or at least “pro women” feature women who embrace their violence via harm towards others. And i get that it’s subversive in a way because historically and statistically, women are not the typical perpetrators of violence, but i don’t think it’s a good thing to emulate the behavior of the people who are the typical perpetrators of violence. We are so much better than that.
gone girl, the good bad girl
In the wake of Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, a genre of literature has emerged that centers on complex, morally ambiguous female characters who often harness violence, manipulation, and rage to navigate a world stacked against them. And these “female killer” books have captivated audiences, not just because of their thrilling narratives, but because they tap into something much deeper: the frustrations of women who’ve grown tired of adhering to societal expectations of docility, politeness, and virtue.
But why are these stories resonating so much with women? And what do they reveal about contemporary feminism?
The rise of these books isn’t just a trend; it’s a cultural phenomenon rooted in a reclamation of women’s capacity for violence—a concept that challenges deeply ingrained stereotypes about femininity and power, but… while these stories may feel empowering on the surface, we have to ask ourselves whether glorifying violence is truly progressive or feminist or pro-women.
women’s violence in literature
Traditional depictions of women in media and literature have long confined us to the role of the nurturer, the victim, or the love interest. Violence, when it appeared in women’s stories, was typically inflicted on women, not by women. And that’s why the female killer books are so subversive. They upend this narrative by placing women in active, often antagonistic roles that defy these docile expectations.
In Gone Girl, Amy Dunne is the ultimate antiheroine: brilliant, ruthless, and deeply flawed. Her infamous “Cool Girl” monologue is a scathing indictment of the ways women are forced to perform for male approval, while her actions throughout the novel—including faking her own death and framing her husband for her murder and actually murdering someone. These books serve as both a critique and a weaponized rejection of patriarchal norms.
And as booktok girlie, I’ve been seeing this play out in other books I’ve been reading as well.
Just like in gone girl, the shift from passivity to agency is mirrored in other works like Bunny by Mona Awad, A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers, Boy Parts by Eliza Clark. I read the girl with the dragon tattoo a long long time ago and now that i’m thinking about it, it also fits into this pattern of women embracing their violence.
These books explore themes of social alienation, revenge, and the dark side of desire. For instance, in Bunny, Awad delves into the violent consequences of social exclusion and conformity, while A Certain Hunger takes readers inside the mind of a cannibalistic food writer who channels her frustrations with the patriarchy into her shocking culinary crimes.
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women, violence, and power
It is this violence that is poised as some sort of power mostly because, for so long, women didn’t have much power because women didn’t have much violence.
According to a study by the UN office on Drugs and Crime (1), males accounted for about 95% of all convicted homicide perpetrators worldwide. What’s interesting is 78.7% of homicide victims are male so this isn’t a female-only issue. But when women are in the picture, it’s almost always a man hurting or killing her.
Even though we already have studies on this, women already experience this violence or threats of this violence in real life, and that’s why these female killer books are so refreshing, so cathartic, dare I say so pleasurable to read.
And that’s because the stories in female killer books are not real. They are fantasy. They are an escape.
Women are trying to escape a world in which we are the victims of violence. And because of the reality of our existence, we have conflated violence with power. Because in our experiences, to be subjected to violence is to be without power. Or rather, to not have power is to be subjected to violence.
And another reason we have conflated violence with power is because for centuries, the idea of a violent woman has been treated as aberrant or monstrous. From the biblical Lilith to the mythical Medusa, female anger and violence has been vilified, feared, suppressed, and considered a monstrosity (Medusa is literally branded as a monster).
So in many ways, female unaliver books are reclaiming this archetype, presenting women’s capacity for violence not as a moral failing, but as a form of power. But this reclamation raises significant ethical and philosophical questions:
Does mirroring the violence of men—often a product of patriarchy itself—truly advance the cause of women? does it grant women true power? Or does it reinforce the problematic notion that power must always be equated with domination and aggression?
Just because those who had power historically have been more violent does not mean achieving equality entails embracing the same destructive tendencies. Being the exact same as men is not liberation. It’s being chained to the same behavior, thought patterns, and objectifying behavior that we ourselves have dealt with.
And this has been my beef with the feminist messaging i’ve been seeing throughout my socialization in the west and i’m very excited for the next coming waves that will tackle the concerns women have with the past waves. My beef is with the vibe that to be equal to men is to be the exact same as men, do the exact same things at the same exact intensity and frequency. But no. We are better than that. We must rise above.
Number one, we are already equal, no need to do anything. We are all created of equal value and worth in the eyes of the Lord, and it is our job on earth to create equity in the eyes of the world.
And number two, we are the source, we are creation, we are the prize. We are the mother, and to be ignored by the mother is to die. So women’s power lies in ignoring. When women take all their energy back, call their power in, those who drain us wither.
And number three, as the conduit to the future, those who do not recognize our equality and do not create conditions for equity do not get a future. You have so much power in you and you have been raised and socialized and policed to think otherwise. You have been taught that power lies in domination and subjugation and violence towards others, but that’s not power. That’s insecurity. And that is so embarrassing… for them.
book club vibes
The violence performed by women in these books often serves as a metaphor for the everyday violence women experience in society. From microaggressions and workplace discrimination to domestic abuse to sexual violence, the systemic inequities women face are not subtle. And in this context, the actions of killer heroines can be seen as exaggerated responses to very real frustrations. Let’s look at some examples:
Boy Parts
Boy Parts explores the toxic dynamics of gendered power and exploitation, with its protagonist turning the male gaze into a weapon.
You want to think you’re not like other women, but you are, you know. You’re still . . . that’s still how the rest of the world, how men are going to see you. Like, I know you hate labels, but like . . . You live in a woman’s body. You’re vulnerable. No matter what you think, you’re vulnerable, and sometimes, you’ll need other people.
—Eliza Clark. Boy Parts. 2020.
It sets up this premise that being subjected to the male gaze is not a matter of option. Simply existing in a female body, simply existing as a woman means that you will be seen as a woman. We are no different from each other, and this differentiation, othering behavior is exactly our downfall because we separate ourselves from each other when we should be communing together. Literally, no matter what we think, we are vulnerable and we will need other people… other women.
And it was very interesting how the main character, Irina who is a photographer, tries to circumvent the male gaze by only photographing men and refusing to photograph women.
Flo kept trying to get me to photograph her, and I’d gone well off photographing women. I gave her this big spiel about the problem of the female form in visual culture, how it was impossible to divorce or protect it from the male gaze in the context of the western art world, yada yada yada.
—Eliza Clark. Boy Parts. 2020.
But in the end, Irina still succumbs to patriarchal thinking and messaging… and violence. She does to other men what other men did to her. And like i said, that’s the subversive part because women getting revenge is unheard of because we’re supposed to just cry and take it (lol no).
A Certain Hunger
If you’re a foodie, you’ll love this book. It’s about a food critic and self-proclaimed psychopath who travels the world, eats a lot of good food… and men. She eats men.
Orgasms are a dime a dozen. Any old human woman can see a man orgasm. We so rarely get to see them die; it has been my greatest gift and my most divine privilege.
—Chelsea G. Summers. A Certain Hunger. 2020.
And she’s unapologetically selfish, violent, and hedonistic. She acknowledges that she is a psychopath but even as a psychopath, she’s still a woman, and so she was still subjected to the socialization of “feminine expectations” that women go through.
Female psychopaths, researchers eventually realized, don’t present like the males. To which I respond: No shit. We women have an emotional wiliness that shellacs us in a glossy patina of caring. We have been raised to take interest in promoting the healthy interior lives of other humans; preparation, I suppose, for taking on the emotional labor of motherhood—or marriage; either way, really. Few women come into maturity unscathed by the suffocating pink press of girlhood, and even psychopaths are touched by the long, frilly arm of feminine expectations. It’s not that women psychopaths don’t exist; it’s that we fake it better than men.
—Chelsea G. Summers. A Certain Hunger. 2020.
And in the novel, Dorothy consumes her lovers, literally consumes them, devours them, eats them. Her cannibalism is a metaphor for rejecting societal expectations of women’s roles as self-sacrificing beings. And also, because women are usually the ones being consumed whether it’s via the male gaze or the many forms of sex work, it’s pretty subversive for a woman, in turn, to do the consuming of men.
Over trays of Bonnie Bell Lip Smackers and mountains of cooling fries, I learned that being female is as prefab, thoughtless, soulless, and abjectly capitalist as a Big Mac. It’s not important that it’s real. It’s only important that it’s tasty.
—Chelsea G. Summers. A Certain Hunger. 2020.
Also, Dorothy is not motivated by seduction or dependence on men. She’s not eating them for revenge or power over them. She just wants to eat them. It’s her appetite and desire motivating her, not because of any personal reasons. And i find this so interesting because she is seeing these men as objects, not as humans which is very very interesting…
And on top of that, because Dorothy isn’t a victim seeking justice, she’s not a “woman scorned,” she doesn’t need a reason to eat men, she just does it. Her rage and violence are simply parts of her identity. This subverts the narrative that women’s anger must be justified by external trauma or oppression.
And last, Dorothy doesn’t care to be liked. Many female protagonists are written to be likable or relatable. Dorothy is neither. She is egotistical, elitist, and horrifyingly brutal. In the novel, Summers, challenges readers to engage with a female character who doesn’t seek their approval or sympathy, flipping the expectation that women in fiction must be… palatable.
Bunny
Another book i read recently was Bunny by Mona Awad.
(idk i feel like Kindle has an algorithm too so you read one female killer book, they suggest you another.)
With Bunny, you need to give it a few chapters because the beginning is so surreal yet familiar? Idk how to explain it but there’s so much going on and you know nothing about what’s going on… but anyway…
The main character, Samantha Mackey, she becomes entangled with a cult-like group of women who all dress the same, talk the same, and they call each other bunny. And basically, the bunnies, they perform these rituals to turn animals into human men, and when the human men don’t live up to their expectations, they whack them…
And it’s basically flipping the script of objectification on its head because now women are doing the objectifying, the taking away of humanity, the taking away of life and reducing a person’s existence to essentially, a pass/fail. And if the creatures fail, they are whacked.
So it hits a lot of the subversion points we just mentioned.
Now I’m not bashing these books at all because they show how complex women can be. That we can be imperfect, unlikeable, plain wrong yet still relate to each other because we are all imperfect and at times unlikeable, and at times, plain wrong. But all of that doesn’t invalidate our womanhood. At our core, we are all women and we live under these systems… systems we have to navigate and contend with.
These books also show how cathartic violence can be for people who have for so long been on the receiving end of it. BUT my hot take (that nobody asked for) is that these books, by glorifying violence, they may inadvertently suggest that equality is about women adopting violent forms of power rather than reimagining power altogether.
I get the cathartic feeling, how refreshing it is to see #womeninmalefields as the tiktok girlies would call it, but framing violence as cathartic can obscure its broader social implications. We shouldn’t create a world where women can be just as violent as men. Instead, we should create a world where systems that perpetuate violence don’t exist. True liberation lies in building a society where power is not rooted in fear or domination, but in equity, compassion, and collaboration.
The Future of Female Killer Fiction
And i think it’s a great privilege to even be discussing these things because these books have already been written. They have allowed us the cathartic feeling, they have allowed us to think even more deeply. They have allowed us these conversations. But as the sub-genre continues to evolve, it’s likely we’ll see even more nuanced portrayals of women who defy convention. Convention that keeps us small, quiet, and forever people pleasing.
I hope today’s edition helps you re-examine what empowerment truly means for you because power doesn’t have to mean adopting the same violent behaviors that have been historically used to subjugate us. Sometimes power is also recognizing your own power and realizing you are above that, you’re better than that.
And also, what i love about these books is they allow women to be messy and complex and unlikeable because it is this complexity that we have always been denied. Women were/are seen as objects, we weren’t allowed interiority. If it wasn’t housework and childcare keeping us busy from dawn till night so we wouldn’t have time to sit down and think for ourselves and write. And when we do write, speak, orate, we are shut down and our perceptions of the world and analyses and predictions and ability to gather other women and share our thoughts, feelings, knowledge, vibes with each other are simply reduced to some moral failing, some fault in our programming because how dare she? how dare they? how dare these women not please us?
And you know what we have to say to that? go f*ck yourself.
Bestie, wake up.
Sources
Gibbons, Jonathan (2013). "Global Study on Homicide"(PDF). www.unodc.org. United National Office of Drugs and Crime (Vienna).