A Father's Story

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Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion. Initially, Dahmer recounts his son's normal, albeit solitary childhood, showing no foreshadowing of the horrors that were to come. Lionel says the doctor could find no physical reason for these attacks and thought the condition was psychological (but she was not referred to a psychiatrist at that point). Even when Jeffrey gets a prison sentence for sexually abusing a 14 year old boy, Lionel remains doggedly optimistic – this will be the short sharp shock he needed.

We are instead given a glimpse into the macabre life of one of the most demented killers in the nation's history, a man who kept a full human skeleton in his closet. But he gained a fair measure of unwanted media attention as the father of Jeffrey Dahmer, a serial killer who was convicted in the early 1990s of murdering fifteen youths in the Milwaukee area. A Father's Story is a memoir written by Lionel Dahmer, father of American serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. But, looking at the world around us, it is important to understand, or even try to understand what lies beneath all this.

When serial killers are apprehended, we hear all about their crimes and the horrible acts they committed.

When he was four, and pointed to his belly button and asked what would happen if someone cut it out, was that merely an ordinary question from a child who had begun to explore his own body, or was it a sign of something morbid already growing in his mind?The strongest statement in the book is Dahmer's denial of an allegation made by a former male lover of Jeffrey's that he sexually abused his son as a teenager. The police were then summoned, and while Sinthasomphone(the underage victim) labored to recover, they asked him where he'd gotten the drug. When he stood trial in the early 1990’s I was fairly young, and I remember equating him with Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart”… in that, a murdered body was carefully dismembered and hidden away in a home. To say that this book humanizes Jeffrey Dahmer is incorrect; it does have the effect, and horribly so, of making me, and I might assume almost any reader, consider that as aberrant as this situation is, it is shared culturally in America today, and even personally. Jonathan Kirsch wrote in his review for the Los Angeles Times: "'A Father's Story' is really more about Lionel Dahmer than his son, a heartfelt effort at self-analysis and self-revelation by a bewildered father forced to accept that his son is a serial murderer: Where did I go wrong?

The lies brought out by this book are great for psychology and analyzing, but the book left me with an unpleasant feeling of disgust and slime. That saying I do not condone ANYTHING he did, but as humans we do have a a little bit of a sick undercurrent, slowing down at accident scenes, a interest in our own demise!

He learned the grisly details of his son's crimes during the trial before which his son was found to be legally sane and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment in February 1992. This is one of the most underrated and rarest books, it took me forever and great effort to find it but it was well worth it.