'My Men' by Victoria Kielland is a fictionalised account of Belle Gunness, America’s first female serial killer, who emigrated from Norway in the late 19th century and was thought to have murdered 14 men in rural Indiana.

Her story is told in the third person, but the writing has such a visceral and urgent quality that it feels like a first-person narrative.

From the first page, the reader is plunged right into Belle’s teenage head and then taken on an opaque, almost impossible-to-pin-down journey that follows her from rural Norway — where she was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Størseth in 1859 — to Chicago, where she lived with her sister for a short time under the name Bella. She later married a farmer, Mads Sørensen, and changed her name to Belle. She became Mrs Gunness when she wed her second husband Peter Gunness in 1902.

The novel refrains from going into detail about the murders she committed — indeed, you’d be hard-pressed to even realise this is what the book is about — and there’s no exploration of her motivations or reasons for killing so many men. (If you check out her Wiki page she made a habit of luring men to her home via marriage ads, then dismembering their bodies and burying them on her property.)

But in creating a relentless portrait of Belle’s inner life — which is mainly full of shame and fear, loneliness and lusty thoughts — we get a glimpse of what’s going on in her head. And we can see that she uses her sexual agency to get what she wants. But it wasn’t always like that.

The reader can see that the seeds were sown when Belle was a teenage girl working on a farm in Norway.

Here, she fell in love with the landowner’s son with whom she carried out an illicit relationship. When she reveals she has fallen pregnant to him, he brutally kicks her in the stomach. It was this unwanted pregnancy (which resulted in a miscarriage) and the way in which her lover so cruelly treated her that precipitated her move to America.

It is the psychological damage of this traumatic event which acts as a driver for all that follows. It’s clear, to this reader at least, that the murders were Belle’s way of avenging (over and over) the way her first lover had crushed her heart and spirit.

'My Men' isn’t an easy book to read, or like. It’s not a forensic examination of the crimes, it’s more an experimental look at what it might be like to walk in Belle’s shoes, to feel what she feels, to experience what she experiences and to live in her head for just a short while.

It was unpleasant and made me feel uncomfortable throughout, and when I came to the end I just felt grubby, like I’d been rubbernecking a fatal car accident. For a book to get under the skin like this, I think it’s fair to say it made an impact — and perhaps, in the end, that’s all the author really wanted to do…

My Men is a haunting and beautifully written novel from a startlingly talented voice. Reaching into the mind of a serial killer, this complex novel offers itself as a terrifying and obsessively readable take on the true crime genre.

Belle Gunness is thought to be America's first female serial killer and was active between the years of 1884 and 1908. This fictional account of her early life gives a highly imaginative and intriguing insight into her life between the ages of 17 and possibly 48. We say 48 as it highly speculated that Belle faked her death at her farm, as when the bodies of ten of her victims were found, alongside the tiny bodies of her own three children, hers was not among them.

Gunness led a very sexually-charged adulthood which resulted in a string of marriages and relationships all in her quest to find love, however each man just wasn't enough and she spent many a night replying to advertisements in Scandinavian newspapers in order to lure in the next man, on which she bestowed a false sense of security until she got bored and buried their lifeless bodies, still holding onto their shocked faces in death, on the grounds of the farm she acquired with the money from the death of her first husband.

During her time as a murderess Gunness looked after her three children just as any mother would, until one day they started to discover just what was happening, she had to put a stop to that as soon as possible.

This book really intrigued me and made me feel EVERYTHING. When you first meet Brynhild (as she is then) she seems to be just your typical teenager of that era, hard working but with sex a constant in her life. As her life unfolds you start to question whether she is a lonely girl/woman just longing for somebody to love her. However we soon discover that even when the newly named 'Belle' finds this with a number of men, it does not last long as she questions whether she is deserving of such a thing, ultimately deciding that it is the thrill of the chase and the act of lust she ultimately desires; a feeling which needs to be renewed regularly and results in hushed and gruesome murders at the fall of most nights.

I really struggled with My Men by Victoria Kielland. The subject really appealed to me, it's the story of Belle Gunness, America's first female serial killer. The book is more a tale of her mental unravelling with her crimes,which I'd guess most potential readers would be expecting to make up the bulk of the book,almost an afterthought at the end.
I found a lot of the book hard to understand with seemingly random streams of consciousness making up most of it. More than once I finished a sentence not understanding what it was supposed to mean,read it again and was still none the wiser.
Ironically the last couple of chapters of book has persuaded me to find a more accessible book about Belle Gunness as her story is a fascinating one. Maybe this is a work of literary genius that I just "didn't get" but I struggled to make much sense out of much of it,let alone enjoy it.

My Men
Victoria Kielland
I have never read a novel about a serial killer that is so beautifully written.
Reaching inside the mind of Belle, a notorious murderer in the late 19th century, I swam in alarming riptides of horror and depression, so poetically revealed that I read it in one sitting.
Not your run of the mill true crime tale but so much more.