Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide

Despite being a work of fiction, Murder Your Employer imitates multiple literary genres. Doing so creates reader expectations, allows a deeper level of engagement with the characters, and adds a humorous tone to the novel. By beginning the book with an absurdist sendup of a self-help guidebook, the text immediately creates a light-hearted tone to contrast with the dark subject matter, immediately establishing the theme of using humor to explore darkness and setting up the reader’s expectations for the rest of the book. Adding excerpts from files, journals, and textbook-like lists of rules, regulations, and timetables furthers the feel of a non-fiction, self-help text. Aside from comedic value, the imitation of a self-help non-fiction book implicates the reader as existing in the same ethical playing field as the rest of the McMasters students and faculty. The narrator (Dean Harrow) assumes that the readers are, like the protagonist, planning to murder an employer. This creates a level of camaraderie and relationship between the reader, narrator, and the protagonists as it implies all parties are tied-up in the theme of The Moral Complexities of Justice.

These non-fiction elements are placed in contrast with another genre. The intimate, seemingly autobiographical confession of Cliff Iverson’s personal journals adds a level of connection and intimacy much like the original confessional text, St. Augustine’s Confessions. The reader is empathetically drawn-in through Cliff’s narration of his experiences and through his informal voice which addresses the reader directly. The reader gets detailed explanations of his feelings and thoughts on his road to his target’s deletion. By placing both the non-fiction elements of charts and explanations next to more intimate confessions and stories of students, the book becomes a unique mix of self-help and confession genres that immerses the reader in the world of McMasters on multiple levels, and through empathy, neutralizes the instinct in the reader to judge murder as a negative action.

Murder Your Employer is also a twist on the genre of traditional murder and crime fiction, though instead of the question being who committed the murder, the question becomes why and how the killer will act. Other novels and media have followed this variation on the detective formula, notably the television show Columbo from the 1970s, where the pleasure is not figuring out the puzzle as much as it is knowing who the killer is and watching the detective piece the elements together. Murder Your Employer is similar in that it provides the identity of the killer and the vicarious pleasure for the reader is not solving the crime but reading as the murderer figures out how to perfectly execute it.