It’s not exactly “earth-shattering” news that, when it comes to serial killers, the American collective has a sick and macabre tendency to “romanticize” them. Not necessarily in what the conventional sense of what that word might mean, but in the sense of giving far more, let’s say, “reverence” and credit to them than they deserve. This, more often than not, comes in the form of limited series—where, in the past, it would have been the “TV movie.” Recent shining examples of that being Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story (a.k.a. Dahmer) and Monster: The Ed Gein Story (yes, they’re both Ryan Murphy’s “brainchildren”). The former caused far more of an outcry than the latter in that many friends and family members of those victims are still alive and forced to relive the trauma every time a new “portrayal” arises. The same goes for Ted Bundy, still often painted as some kind of “handsome” and “intelligent” devil. Jessica Knoll’s historical fiction novel, Bright Young Women, aims to upend those lingering falsities about the man who was referred to in early news articles as “The Lady Killer” and “The Handsome Stranger”—both names displaying a bizarre fetish for his so-called “good looks.” His actual image, of course, tells a different story. Like, sure, maybe he was “attractive” for a serial killer. A compliment about as high-paying as a woman being told she looks good for her age.

And, talking of women’s ages, it was hardly a coincidence that Bundy was known for targeting solely young women. Getting off not just on their appearance (particularly if they had long hair—another way in which Bundy was a total cliché), but on striking a woman down when she still had so much life ahead of her. To be sure, Bundy had an undeniable amount of jealousy when it came to seeing women he perceived as overly confident or smart. Almost as if to kill them was to “put them in their place” and to “teach them a lesson.” What’s more, it helped him avoid that ultimate mediocre male fear of being found out that he was mediocre. Being “laughed at,” whether literally or figuratively. For to quote Margaret Atwood during a 1982 university lecture, “‘Why do men feel threatened by women?’ I asked a male friend of mine… ‘men are bigger, most of the time, they can run faster, strangle better and they have on the average a lot more money and power.’ ‘They’re afraid women will laugh at them,’ he said… I asked some women students in a quickie poetry seminar I was giving, ‘Why do women feel threatened by men?’ ‘They’re afraid of being killed.’”

As many women were forced to fully fathom when it came to Bundy. Yet, even despite how provably diabolical he was, Edward Cowart (very close to Coward), the judge presiding over his 1979 sentencing, had the audacity to tell Bundy, after declaring how “shockingly evil” and “vile” his crimes were, “You’re a bright young man. You’d have made a good lawyer and I would have loved to have you practice in front of me, but you went another way, partner. I don’t feel any animosity toward you. I want you to know that. Once again, take care of yourself.”

It was this very male whitewashing of/delusion about the reality of things that inspired Knoll to write Bright Young Women (hearing this particular sound bite while watching the Netflix documentary, Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes), consulting with none other than Kathy Kleiner Rubin, one of the survivors of Bundy’s murder attempts—specifically during his spree at Florida State University on January 15, 1978. Kleiner Rubin’s real-life roommate, Karen Chandler, also survived Bundy’s brutal attack with a piece of oak firewood. Though, in Bright Young Women, the stand-in for her, Denise Andora, isn’t so lucky. As for the inspiration behind the protagonist, Pamela Schumacher, Kleiner is the obvious muse. However, it isn’t only from Pamela’s perspective that the story is told, with an interweaving of character accounts that flips back and forth across time, moving through past, present and future with a seamlessness that sews the narrative into a tapestry of mystery, horror and healing.

But it all begins with Pamela, who kicks off the grisly tale by mentioning that, “…my name has long since fallen to a footnote in the story.” As have so many other victims of Bundy’s, referred to only as “The Defendant” for the entirety of the book. An overtly deliberate choice on Knoll’s part, who, like so many others, is sick to the point of disgust with the way that abusive and/or murderous men shove women further down even in death, somehow managing to, once again, make it all about themselves. Worse still, manipulate the enduringly patriarchal perspective on everything to ensure that no matter how guilty and depraved they are, they’re still called things like a “promising young man.” The type of phrase also associated with Brock Turner, the notorious rapist from Stanford University who ultimately compelled writer-director Emerald Fennell to title her debut film Promising Young Woman as a means to subvert that phrase. To, like Knoll, put the focus back on the victims of these men who are still, appallingly, held up as “promising” and “bright” after they take away the promisingness and brightness of women.

For Pamela, witnessing this firsthand and coming face to face with the killer the night of his attack at her sorority house is enough to haunt her for the rest of her life. Even as she becomes stronger and more empathetic as a result of the crime and the loss that stems from it. A kind of strength and empathy that immediately connects her to a woman named Martina “Tina” Cannon, who enters the fray in Florida because she has her own vested interest in making sure “The Defendant” is convicted for his crimes and fried in the electric chair. This because, as she tells Pamela, “Four years ago, he killed my friend Ruth.” But Ruth Wachowski was far more than just a friend to Pamela; the two were domestic partners at a time when, as Knoll would remind in a 2023 interview with Bazaar, “Homosexuality was still listed in the DSM as an illness.” Which is exactly how Ruth’s overbearing, manipulative mother sees it, sending Ruth to “conversion” therapy when she’s in high school. Such details being gradually meted out as the perspectives start to shift from Pamela’s only to Ruth’s as well. The latter narrating the events that occur throughout the year of 1974, when she meets Tina at a grief support group and begins to transform and come out of her shell because of this friendship. A friendship that doesn’t take long to turn sexual because of their chemistry.

Unlike Pamela, though, Tina doesn’t even have the small consolation of knowing what actually happened to Ruth, for she disappeared one summer day when she was trying to find Tina at Lake Sammamish. The site of two of Bundy’s most brazen crimes, luring twenty-three-year-old Janice Ott and nineteen-year-old Denise Naslund away with his cockamamie story about needing help with unloading a sailboat while posing as injured with a sling around his neck. Reportedly labeled as an “attractive young man” by eyewitnesses who observed the scene, that very description is in keeping with the myth of Bundy. Along with his “intelligence” and “knack for psychological manipulation” when, in fact, all he was doing was capitalizing on most women’s conditioning to acquiesce, to be helpful and “caretaking.” Especially at that time.

This, too, is part of the driving force behind Knoll’s decision to write the book, telling Bazaar, “I wanted to disprove the idea that he got his victims with his looks and charm. A lot of what we heard was that women trusted him because he was so good-looking and charming. But more often than not, he posed as injured and would solicit young women for help.” Knoll’s deep-dive into some of the eyewitness accounts of the Lake Sammamish interactions between Janice Ott and Bundy corroborates that—the notion that women were taken advantage of by Bundy for the inherent pressure they felt to be “nice.” “Accommodating.” Knoll summarized one eyewitness account by adding, “He was bothering [Ott]. She just was laying out on her towel trying to get a tan, trying to enjoy the day, and he came over was just kind of ruining her day. She really had to be convinced to go off with him. He had his arm in a sling… And he was like, ‘Would you help me?’ And she didn’t want to, but he wore her down. I thought, Wow, it’s such a different thing to go off with someone because you feel you can’t say no.” In other words, it would be such a different thing for a man to go off with someone or do something he didn’t want to do in general just because he was being guilted or needled into it. Because most men, in contrast to most women, aren’t indoctrinated with that sense of guilt or pressure to comply, to be “affable.”

Knoll’s low-simmering rage, as channeled through Pamela, reaches a new boiling point after the latter meets Tina, characterizing “The Defendant” as follows:

On the Wanted poster I held in my hands that dingy afternoon in Tina’s rental car, The Defendant peered back at me with black vacant eyes. They are scary eyes, don’t get me wrong, but what frightens me, what infuriates me, is that there isn’t anything exceptionally clever going on behind them. A series of national ineptitudes and a parsimonious attitude toward crimes against women created a kind of secret tunnel through which a college dropout with severe emotional disturbances moved with impunity for the better part of the seventies. Law enforcement would rather we remember a dull man as brilliant than take a good hard look at the role they played in this absolute sideshow, and I am sick to death of watching them in their pressed shirts and cowboy boots, in their comfortable leather interview chairs, in hugely successful and critically acclaimed crime documentaries, talking about the intelligence and charm and wiliness of an ordinary misogynist.”

And yet, to this day, the myth of Bundy as some legal wunderkind with good looks persists (the man had a unibrow, for fuck’s sake). Look no further than the Friends of Lake Sammamish description of Bundy on the thirtieth anniversary of his execution: “Ted Bundy was charming, intelligent and generally regarded as handsome with a promising career ahead of him.” That word again, promising. Ah yes, and handsome. Perhaps the most absurd aspect of the myth. With someone like Zac Efron playing him in a 2019 Netflix movie called Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile (and yes, 2019 was a big year for the Bundy machine since it was the thirtieth anniversary of his execution). Knoll makes reference to the apparent inability of casting agents to cast anyone “mid”-looking to play Bundy toward the end of the novel, with one chapter that takes place in 2019 as Pamela overhears a conversation at a Starbucks between two girls discussing the recent Netflix doc on “The Defendant.” One of them seethes, “How many movies do we already have about him? And this time he’s played by Zac Efron?”

With the publication of Bright Young Women (and the likelihood that it, too, will be adapted into a movie—for it was certainly written to be), one can only hope that at least a small but impactful step toward rewriting the narrative about “The Defendant” to shift the focus to where it rightfully should be—on the victims—will become the norm rather than the exception.