Warning: the following story contains descriptions of gore, harm to children, and themes of sexual violence. Reader discretion is advised.

During the summer of 1999, there was a string of murders in a twenty mile radius around Sunshine, Minnesota. It wasn’t the sort of place you’d expect a serial killer to crop up. The whole population was just over fifteen hundred people. There was a single building that housed the K-12 school. There was just one grocery store. One gas station. Old folks left their doors unlocked at night. There wasn’t ever much theft or petty crime. Everybody knew everybody else, and strangers didn’t often have much cause to pass through.

I was born in Sunshine, just like my parents, and their parents, on and on back through the generations since our family immigrated from Scandinavia. Like most people in town, we were tall, and stocky, with fair skin and pronounced midwestern accents. Bag is pronounced like ‘beg’ and any food can be made in casserole form if you are creative enough. 

My two best friends lived on my block. Patrick Otternoose, the buck-toothed, bespectacled disaster, and Violet Espinoza, with her curly dark hair and small, perfectly-centered nose. The three of us would make snowmen, and drink copious amounts of hot chocolate, and play video games all winter. When summer came and the snow melted, we’d ride our bikes around town, seeing what sort of trouble we could stir up.

In the summer of 1999, I was eleven years old. Just out of fifth grade, heading into sixth. I think I was still too young to really understand the panic that rippled through our town when the murders started. But I was old enough to notice how every adult’s face looked stricken and afraid.