Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen

From my Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen, author of Bad Men: A Novel:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

My novel, Bad Men, is about a female serial killer who kills bad men who hurt women—rapists, murderers, abusers. The title is slightly misleading and ironic in that the novel isn’t about the bad men; it’s about the protagonist, Saffy, who is by all normal moral standards quite a bad woman, as she has murdered a lot of people. The novel is meant to be funny and highly satirical, and one of the fun parts about writing the story was the inversion of ‘bad’ and ‘good’—with almost all of the ‘bad’ men going unpunished and even abetted by normal society, and almost all of the ‘good’ characters, including Saffy and her love interest, Jon, doing lots of things that are extremely morally questionable. Suffice it to say that the serial killers in this book, while not necessarily cuddly, would be fun to have a drink with.

Of course, there’s a serious intent behind this story, which is to highlight the epidemic of male violence against women. So in that aspect...[read on]

Visit Julie Mae Cohen's website.

The Page 69 Test: Bad Men.

Q&A with Julie Mae Cohen.

--Marshal Zeringue