My Men - Victoria Kielland (Translated by Damion Searls )

 

Victoria Kielland's My Men is a fictional account of a very real woman thought to be the first female serial killer in American history. She may have been the first, but before she could be stopped Brynhild Størset would claim some thirty victims after leaving Norway to begin her new life in America.

Størset was only seventeen years old when she informed the firstborn son of the wealthy farmer she worked for that she was pregnant with his child. Expecting that the young man would be pleased by the news, Brynhild was surprised when he kicked her in the stomach hard enough to cause her to lose her baby. Now faced with humiliation and destitution in Norway, the girl decided to take her chances in the United States - where she changed her name to Belle Gunness. 

Belle ended up in Chicago for a while, where her sister lived, but soon enough moved to a countryside farm after marrying a fellow Norwegian. That marriage lasted only until Belle, having had enough of the man, ended it by killing her husband. Now she had a stake in her new country, along with the two little girls she and the man had taken into their home. Before long, Belle was remarried, and the pattern was established. She continued to do quite well adding to her wealth via the dead-husband route, but realized that her luck could not hold out forever so she varied the pattern by placing "Lonely Heart" ads in the Chicago papers to keep the men coming.

And for a long time, lonely, desperate men kept right on coming to Belle's farm - never to be seen again.

But it is not Belle's spectacular murder spree that makes My Men so unusual a historical novel. It is unlikely that the novel would have gotten so much attention on both sides of the Atlantic if Kielland had taken a straightforward approach to presenting Belle's story. Instead, the author uses a strange hybrid third person/first person point of view in which the reader learns more about what is going on in Belle's head as she kills than about the murders themselves or Belle's victims. Almost everything revealed to the reader is limited to what Belle saw with her own eyes or what she had specific knowledge of. What we as readers experience is all the pent-up anger, frustration, and hatred that drives Belle, allowing her to kill so many men in her quest for personal revenge for the way she was treated as a young woman in Norway. 

I even had to go back to re-read a section or two to make sure that a murder had actually taken place because Belle felt so justified in committing her crimes that they sometimes hardly seemed to impact her other than with how much physical labor was involved in disposing of the bodies of her victims. Reading My Men makes for such an unusual reading experience, I think, that even those readers who would not ordinarily read this type of novel might want to take a chance on it.

Below is a picture of Belle and the two little girls she and her first husband took into their home, along with Belle's own son. Take a look at Belle's eyes and chilling expression...