Wildlife on the Serengeti

If you can dream it, you can kill it.

Mac Sexton is a good-looking teenager and up-and-coming force of nature who harbors a secret ambition: to become the Number One Serial Killer in America, if not the world. Born into a wealthy, robustly dysfunctional family in the Northeast, and choosing (It/It/Its) as preferred pronouns, Mac chronicles its grisly journey from abused child to apex predator in humor darker than a lump of anthracite.

Mac’s family is a veritable smorgasbord of warped souls. Its father, referred to by Mac sarcastically as “Dear Old Dad,” is a powerful and well-thought-of figure in the community, a Yale alumnus whose achievements and privilege camouflage a secret life of gut-wrenching perversity. Mac’s mother is a gin-swilling socialite and all-around enabler who routinely turns a blind eye to her husband’s cruelty. Mac’s younger adoptive sister Morgan is a conniving 10-year-old, a pint-sized problem child from China with more issues than Hustler. Mac’s older brother Wally is an awkward loner bullied by their father and on a path of self-destruction, especially when he decides to follow in his father’s footsteps and use Mac for his personal enjoyment, not realizing that his younger sibling is morphing everyday into one of the most vicious creatures the Devil on a bad day has ever created—a twisted child with a high IQ, a streak of mean wider than the Mississippi and Styx combined, and an insatiable appetite for violence—a psychopath who considers Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy as heroes and stellar role models.

From its days in an elite prep school wreaking havoc on wayward teachers, to its time spent in a hardcore “troubled teen” therapy program in the Utah desert where it finds itself eventually captured by a cult group of renegade Mormons, to its embittering enrollment as a student at Vassar and Amherst, Mac proves unflinching in its desire to rack up the body count of victims to stratospheric levels.

Dropping out of college, Mac heads to Maryland where it witnesses the murder of a bearded cross-dressing Good Samaritan before travelling to Richmond, Virginia, where an 85-year-old billionaire, smitten by lust and with a taste for wives and catamites, proposes marriage, much to the horror of the doddering old sugar daddy’s family. It is while travelling to Tennessee, under the guise of visiting Graceland to pay respects to Elvis instead of searching for fresh victims, that Mac’s BMW hits a deer, and a kindly old couple stops to render aid—an event that will prove pivotal for Mac, and definitely not for the better, thrusting the teen into a nightmarish world that will demand the utmost in survival skills and resolve, forcing it to use its unique skill set and bloodlust and can-do attitude to prove once and for all that it, and it only, deserves the title of Number One Serial Killer in America. A title for which no consolation prize is given for second place.