I Hunt Killers

“Jazz went for his binoculars. He owned three different pairs, each for different purposes, each a gift from his father, who had very specific reasons for giving them to his son. Jazz tried to not to think about those reasons.”

In the first chapter of the novel, the nature of the father-son relationship between Jazz and his father, Billy Dent, remains unclear. Without explicitly revealing that Billy is a serial killer, the author drops clues that suggest that Billy Dent is not a typical father. For example, that Billy would give Jazz three sets of binoculars and, for some reason, that Jazz has an aversion to thinking why he was gifted three sets of binoculars.

“Jazz had been seeing those for as long as he could remember, thanks to Dear Old Dad. For Dear Old Dad, Take Your Son to Work Day was year-round. Jazz had witnessed crime scenes the way cops wished they could— from the criminal’s point of view.”

With a serial killer for a father, Jazz has been exposed to crime scenes and all that goes along with them from a very young age: dead bodies, weapons, blood, and gore. For Jazz, his father often killed victims in their home, which is why Jazz calls “Take Your Son to Work Day” as a “year-round” occurrence. Jazz refers to his father sarcastically as “Dear Old Dad,” drawing attention to how his dad was not the stereotypical, all-American example of a father.

“Jazz was afraid of two things in the world, and two things only. One of them was that people thought that his upbringing meant that he was cursed by nature, nurture, and predestination to be a serial killer like his father. The second thing…was that they were right.” 

In Chapter 2, Jazz introduces one of the central questions of the book: Will he turn out like his father? This quotation lays bare Jazz’s biggest fears that the people of Lobo’s Nod think he is fated to become a serial killer. Although he does his best to suppress any sort of violent compulsion, Jazz does have some urges that he cannot seem to control.