Murder Your Employer: The McMasters Guide to Homicide

Despite being a work of fiction, Murder Your Employer imitates multiple literary genres. Doing so creates reader expectations, allows a deeper level of engagement with the characters, and adds a humorous tone to the novel. By beginning the book with an absurdist sendup of a self-help guidebook, the text immediately creates a light-hearted tone to contrast with the dark subject matter, immediately establishing the theme of using humor to explore darkness and setting up the reader’s expectations for the rest of the book. Adding excerpts from files, journals, and textbook-like lists of rules, regulations, and timetables furthers the feel of a non-fiction, self-help text. Aside from comedic value, the imitation of a self-help non-fiction book implicates the reader as existing in the same ethical playing field as the rest of the McMasters students and faculty. The narrator (Dean Harrow) assumes that the readers are, like the protagonist, planning to murder an employer. This creates a level of camaraderie and relationship between the reader, narrator, and the protagonists as it implies all parties are tied-up in the theme of The Moral Complexities of Justice.

These non-fiction elements are placed in contrast with another