Sleep perchance to dream.

      Stephen King might say that people write about killing and murdering because it allows you think all of the things that your not supposed to think.  Your not supposed to think about about what it would be like to get revenge, or stone some on to death, or shoot an injured family in cold blood.  Writing about these things give the writer as well as the reader an opportunity to vent these emotions.  I think that there is some validity to that, but I think that the issue at hand is much bigger.

      I think, it is a way of trying to grapple with our mortality, to understand to some degree our last moment before it comes.  Writing about a killing or murder as opposed to the a death as the result of of cancer or act of nature, gives people a sense of control that they wouldn't have otherwise.  The sense of helplessness is still there, because I think that it is easier to relate to a victim than a murder.  However my belief is that the murder is a device used to personify death so that it is easier to understand.

      When you have someone with a motive for killing, whatever that motive is.  It makes death a little bit simpler, easier to contemplate.  I have no idea how I might react to the news of having cancer, or some other terminal illness.  When I read one of the stories like this, though.  I can place myself in that situation and by doing so contemplate what it is to die, what my dying thoughts might be, and how the world would be effected by my death.