Everyday Psychokillers looks and sounds like a thriller: the cover (a portrait of a sliced-up face) promises an encounter with Ted Bundy, or the notorious “Nipple-digger”—or at least a neighborhood creep. But Lucy Corin’s debut reads less like Bret Easton Ellis than Annie Dillard—poetic, plotless, full of intricate descriptions of lizards and swamps. The book, which elegantly bobs along from one creepy anecdote to another, is not about psychokillers, but the boredom and desperation that makes them appealing. The nameless thirteen-year-old narrator lives in a Florida suburb that is “just more obviously bad than other places.” Like Dillard, who stares at birds for so long that she starts tweeting, the narrator thinks about her freaky culture so much that she begins wondering, casually, what it would be like to kill another girl.

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—Rachel Aviv