The Monster Speaks: “All Us Saints” and Ed Gein’s Legacy

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The trailer for Netflix’s 2025 miniseries Monster: The Ed Gein Story, their latest Ryan Murphy-produced bad-taste true-crime sausage-chain, starts with body parts. Stretched skin, slices of meat jammed into a drawer. Investigators brandishing their astonishment like blunt objects. And then, at the moment of highest tension, Charlie Hunnam’s hulking form, wearing a lace-neck dress and his mother’s skin over his face like a rubber Halloween mask. Before Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Silence of the Lambs, the text on the screen reads, There Was the Monster.

The central figure of Katherine Packert Burke’s novel All Us Saints (May 2026, Bloomsbury) is also identified as The Monster, though her birth name, we learn, is Roland St. Cloud. A closeted trans woman, she stabs her sister’s best friends to death in May of 1992. The book primarily takes place nineteen and then twenty years later, in the same house, on the anniversaries of the killings, focusing on the family that survived. 

The specter of the transfeminine serial killer looms large in the American cultural imagination, if not reality—the figure in a dress who shouldn’t be, a homegrown pathology. We see her ghoulish visage, as Monster’s teaser signals, in the classics of American horror cinema, but she has seeped through to the present as well. Take, say, Nicolas Cage’s glam-rock obsessed androgyne in 2024’s Longlegs (or if not the movie itself, the promotional interviews where Cage refers to the character as a “he-she”). While at first glance All Us Saints adheres to these signifiers, it neatly ducks the gawky scopophilia of the tradition—a scopophilia critic Grace Byron succinctly outlines in her recent review of Burke’s book for The Baffler.

Rather, the novel, mainly a chamber drama (the book is divided into two acts, and opens with a cast of characters), tends towards earnest psychological investigation. How, precisely, does such a violent act as murder impact the psyche of those who witness it? “It hovers over them the way stink hangs around an abattoir,” Burke writes early on, about the separate specter of transition . She could just as easily be talking about the event itself, how it marked this damaged, flawed family.

Burke writes effectively into the pathologies that develop in the siblings: Edna’s collapsing marriage and collapsing photography career, Calla’s dysfunctional immersion into a Second Life-esque video game and younger girlfriend after abandoning her own dramaturgical practice, which is implied to be its own avoidant strategy too. “At last when she was a writer, there was a sense of progress,” Calla reminisces. “The steady rhythm of revision and rehearsal. Opening night. It may have been a lie, a distraction from the real. But who doesn’t love a good distraction?” 

But the sheer accumulated weight of violence is most clearly visible, provocatively, in Roland’s own life. In a bravura thirty-five-page monologue splitting the two acts—the only part of the book in first-person—Burke delves into Roland’s psyche, the “comfort in the darkness of the dragon’s belly” she maintains until she can’t, the absolute despairing winnowing down of options accompanying both the closet and the force of unspoken violence—sexual, social—on oneself as well. Burke’s decision to rupture her received form with Roland’s voice is the boldest decision she makes in the work, speaking to a cosmogony of violence and pain that she handles with measured empathy and a consideration of violence’s consequences alike. In this way, she rejects the worst impulses of much true-crime—the mealy-mouthed carcerality of it, the mean desire to watch people punished. It’s notable, too, that the most uncomplicatedly villainous character in the novel is not Roland but her brother-in-law Roger, a true-crime author who married into the family after reporting on it and, by the novel’s end, has left his wife to pursue a relationship with another book subject. When Roger descends into a rage at the rest of the family, his is described as “an anger that teaches them how to live in the world.” Some anger. Some world.

There’s a narrative and moral weight in complicating Roland’s own impulses. Ed Gein, who Burke has named in interviews as a prefiguration of her own Monster, looms large in the cultural imagination, as the Netflix show’s success indicates. We see his legacy in the legislative and ogling force circumscribing trans bodily autonomy: the bathroom bills criminalizing our ability to access private spaces; the demeaning full-body pat-downs many trans people endure from TSA when flying (as I did for many years); the ban on gender-related care for trans youth; the profoundly cruel gender-based policies in this country’s prisons, jails, and detention centers. What does it mean that Gein, as research has shown, probably never cross-dressed? The myth of him doing so, laundered through the true crime tabloids of the 1950s into the Oscar-winners of the 1990s, has done the work—or, at least, contributed to it.

All Us Saints isn’t a literal response to Gein, but it is a response to the idea of Gein—someone who commits a violence that can’t be undone, whose gender is linked to her isolation, who is perverse and because of that needs to be punished. In the moments of its greatest power—the bleakness of Roland’s life, the swarming media exploitation the family endures in the wake of her actions—reading the novel feels like spooning a live wire. It’s precisely the blunt tenderness of that approach that saves the novel from reinscribing misery qua misery, positing a life outside the cosmic curse that Gein’s has been received as. 

Specifically, the gradual gender awakening of James—another closeted trans woman and Roland’s youngest sister—alternates between pragmatic despair and hope that things will get better. “I think you have to pick what happens next,” her girlfriend Heather tells James at the end of a fight about her reluctance to come out, a line that resonates as freeing and chilling in equal measure. The reveal that another minor character in the novel is also a trans woman a few pages later feels like an olive branch to a reader who, like James, might be considering emerging. It feels like saying, we’re here. Even in the wake of the violence that’s marked us, there can be hope if you let it enter.

By leaning rather than attempting to temper or equivocate the violence ascribed to us, Burke argues that queer and trans identity is legitimate even in the event of irredeemable harm. It’s not Roland’s transness that leads to the murders, exactly, but they are exacerbated by the crises impacted by that identity: sexual violence; grooming; being an unprotected self, as almost all children are. In this way, the murders are inseparable from the identity, because the identity leads to violences trickling down. At its most surprising moments, All Us Saints advances an argument for protecting and listening to children, especially queer and trans children. “I believe the only way out of the body is to fight and lose,” Roland says just before she picks up the knife. The book argues, on a deep level, that this isn’t, and shouldn’t be, the case. 

“There are no miracles or curses here,” Burke writes towards the end of the novel after another shattering act of violence occurs. She’s speaking of the family’s own legacy, but I interpret the line more broadly than that: pointing to a universe in which what befalls us is neither doomed nor protected, a universe in which we’re neither victim nor monster. It’s important, I believe, to reject the balm of “good” representational politics, which clearly isn’t serving us right now, but also to shake off the crepuscular shadow of our monsters. In presenting the deep, complicated, and irredeemable pain of one person, and the shattered and rebuilding hopes of those left in her action’s wake, All Us Saints does both. Instead of miracles or curses, it suggests, there’s just us.