How do we really know who anyone is these days? Like that teenage girl everybody says is so cute. She's smart—interested in Kantian ethics, among other things—and close to her family. But what if somebody had been watching when she got some serious alone time on her computer?
"For a while," says Katherine Ewell, a freshman from Los Angeles, "I had very scary Google searches."
All for a creative cause. The result is Dear Killer, a soon-to-be-published (April 1) novel about a high school serial killer—a girl with "a smattering of freckles dashed across a thin nose like Audrey Hepburn's"—who tells the story of her nihilistic activity with casual vividness. Spilled blood is "the color of cherry cough medicine." A body hits the floor "like a broken plate." It seems appropriate somehow that Ewell says her focus at Stanford will be split between English and biology.
Not surprisingly, the novel also has an intriguing duality. It's targeted at the young adult market by Katherine Tegen Books, a children- and teen-oriented imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. But Ewell conceived her protagonist, whose name is Kit, with only a "vague feeling" that youthful readers might relate to the character. Most of what she was writing seemed to unspool as moral issues "that deal more with adults." And now that Ewell, 18, is the cheerful prodigy author of a violently mature tale, it will be interesting to see which of those things is of greater fascination to the book world.
"It's kind of a weird juxtaposition, isn't it?" says Ewell, who describes her personality as almost ceaselessly sunny. Her parents first reacted to the book, she says, by declaring that people would assume they were crazy, because what else would explain their daughter's literary impulses.
In fact, Dear Killer sprang from a high school assignment that plunged her into stacks of reading on moral philosophy. She says she can't remember the moment when Kit coalesced for her as the basis for a novel. But she quickly was consumed by the idea of a character whose complexity was embodied in a dual nature.
"It's easy to see villains as thoroughly evil, as beyond being human," says Ewell. "But the truth is, a lot of these people doing these awful, awful things believe they're in the right. I think it's sometimes dangerous to see people as thoroughly evil without seeing the motivation that's behind their actions."
Ewell insists her portrayal of Kit wasn't influenced by the trendiness of serial killer motifs. She didn't get around to sampling cable TV's Dexter until the editing of Dear Killer was done. Kit, she says, is all her own.
And by the way, "I don't condone murder," she says cheerily.
