Reading Log #3: Just Like Chicken

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Recommended: Use of irony in short stories

Is it wrong to call a dead person’s corpse an it, disregarding everything that happened before their death. In Barry Lyga’s I Hunt Killers, seventeen-years-old Jasper “Jazz” Dent is helping the local police in solving several murder cases. The only problem is that Jazz was raised and trained by his father, serial killer Billy “The Artist” Dent, to become the greatest serial killer in history. Throughout the entire course of the story Jazz struggles with stopping a new serial killer who is imitating his father’s old kill and keeping his sanity in check. As this is a horror and detective story, there are many uses of situational and verbal irony. Verbal irony is used constantly to reflect the thoughts inside the protagonist’s mind as a teenager and a sociopath while situational irony is used in order to create suspense within the story.
The verbal irony is seen mostly by the words Billy Dent used when showing a young Jazz the “family business.” “Easy. So easy. It’s just like cutting chicken” (164). During Jazz’s childhood, Billy would teach him how to torture and torment victims before killing them. At this time he was instructing Jazz in cutting one of his latest victim. He constantly tells Jazz that it was just as easy as cutting off the skin from a chicken’s body. This shows verbal irony, as the victim was still conscious when Billy was conducting his “lesson” and probably struggled around in an attempt to escape. Jazz also had a hard time performing the act as he knew the identity of the victim and became so traumatized that he blocked the identity of the person and the act itself from his memory in order to have some sort of closure. This act would soon haunt him in the future as a dream where he starts questioning whether or...

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...knocked out, given mild sedative, and is restrained. Here the Impressionist reveals his plan to Jazz, which is the second situational irony. “I’m not going to kill you. I’m going to help you” (338). The Impressionist went through great lengths of creating a fake identity and killing four women, to help Jazz, the one who is hunting him down in the name of justice and his own sanity, to become a killer. The irony of this situation is just baffling.
The story provides verbal, situational, and even dramatic irony through different usage. While verbal irony is used for getting inside the character’s mind, dramatic and situation irony was used to create suspense to the story. In today’s world, the horror genre exploits the three types of irony, causing them to commonplace and predictable. Those however are fictional, as the ones of reality could be much more dangerous.

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