Content warnings: violence, animal abuse, ableism, homophobia, necrophilia, sexual assault.

My Friend Dahmer is a nonfiction graphic novel about the author's time growing up as a junior high/high school classmate of the infamous serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. He explains how pitiable of a teen Dahmer was, and the home life that plagued him, as well as going into some of the mental health struggles the killer faced from a young age, such as his obsession with corpses and their insides, or his desperate fantasies of having relations with them.

While this was a really insightful graphic novel, it was definitely an uncomfortable read, though I'm not sure how any nonfiction book about a killer-in-the-making wouldn't be. While there's not actually much talk at all about Dahmer as a murderer of humans, there is a lot of commentary surrounding the animals he abused and killed, as well as his terrible actions towards other human beings. There's an incredibly long-running shtick in the story about Dahmer's crude imitations of disabled individuals, and the length to which the "joke" goes is shocking and distasteful. I don't feel like it was at all necessary to saturate the story so heavily with this one particular aspect, and probably would have given this book 4 stars if it weren't for how incredibly heavy the ableism is.