NoxCon was originally featured in the daily fiction section of the Mystery Tribune in May 2021. I originally wrote it while we were all locked down due to the global pandemic and began sending it around to literary mags in Fall 2020. I learned an important lesson about literary magazines through this process…they want literary fiction. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure of the difference between literary fiction and what I was writing. The short stories I’d written thus far weren’t science fiction, mystery, suspense or even crime fiction. My first publication was essentially a Faustian tale that found a home on some fringe online magazine in the UK and this was my perspective on how the worst parts of our society had become pop culture. Through many denial emails, I learned that what I’d written thus far was genre fiction, even if I couldn’t clearly see the genre and that in literary circles…calling something “genre fiction” was this passive-aggressive way of discounting it’s worth. Once I figured that out, I targeted a different audience of magazines and things worked out from there.
I made some changes as I converted NoxCon to a serialized story for Substack. The title was first to go, as 2020 will always be the year of the pandemic (even if someone hosted a giant serial killer fan convention in a major U. S. city). I got rid of all character names and scrapped the ending as the former wasn’t important to the story and the latter I hated. Both were originally included because I hadn’t figured out how to write a story where the event is the main character. Once I accepted that the narrator was just a vehicle for me to describe the worst convention society could conjure, I felt better about the story.
And that’s what I wanted to write about. In spring 2020, I was still teaching criminal justice classes at a local university and among my course load was a class on ethics and another on criminology. In both classes, we discussed the how and why of punishing criminals, why crime exists in society, and who commits those crimes. A favored exercise of students was to talk about the true-crime documentaries they recently watched, most about hugely complex financial frauds or brutal murders committed by psychopaths. While I was always happy to indulge them (because at least they were showing interest in the field of criminology/criminal justice), the reality was that they would never come in contact with either population in their professional life. If they did, it would be the equivalent of winning the lottery while being struck by lightning. I would share my own experience of sitting across from inmates and felons, assessing their risk to the community, hearing their stories, and only once recommending to a prosecutor that society would be safer if this person were locked up until they were sixty (it’s a concept called selective incapacitation: if you can identify and remove the small percentage of society responsible for the largest amount of crime, you would reduce the crime rate…think Minority Report, but without precognition). It didn’t matter. College students majoring in criminal justice want to learn about serial killers. If there’s a class offered (and there always is), it’s full.
But it isn’t just the college classroom where this content sells, just scroll through the guide from your cable provider or subscription service. Look at what’s streaming on Netflix or Hulu. Check out a few of the top non-fiction podcasts on iTunes or Spotify. You don’t have to go far before finding true-crime, specifically serial killers, spree killers, or a particularly brutal murder case. These are niche subjects in the field of criminal justice, outliers on the bell curve of criminology, but people are drawn to the morbidity of it. NoxCon originated there, as an exaggerated progression of how these true-crime events have evolved into pop culture phenomena. There’s no lesson in morality, no veiled PSA contained within these vehicles. We’re thrilled by the fact that most of these killers hide in plain sight. We’re enthralled by their brutality and we lie to ourselves, as though we’re trying to understand the unthinkable, when in fact…we’re all just driving past the wreck on the roadside, unable to look away.