{"id":306594,"date":"2026-02-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/?p=306594"},"modified":"2026-02-17T06:51:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-17T11:51:11","slug":"patriarchy-is-a-serial-killer-stalking-its-own-golden-boys","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/electricliterature.com\/patriarchy-is-a-serial-killer-stalking-its-own-golden-boys\/","title":{"rendered":"Patriarchy Is a Serial Killer Stalking Its Own Golden Boys"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

For decades, in a series of unsettling cases that have fascinated people around the country for their eerie similarities, young men who fit a certain \u201call-American\u201d profile have been found dead in frozen bodies of water. White, college-aged, traditionally attractive, and presumably cishet, they tend to be good at school and sports and are often last seen out drinking before their disappearances. Their physical resemblance to one another is also uncanny. \u201cWe could have been cousins, if not brothers,\u201d says Caleb Aldrich, one of four such boys who form a chorus of beyond-the-grave narrators in Christopher Castellani\u2019s latest novel Last Seen<\/a><\/em>, which draws its inspiration from these real-life cases.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Other details that the real cases have in common\u2014a smiley face graffito is usually painted nearby, the guys are discovered with their arms crossed over their chests, as if hugging themselves warm\u2014led two retired detectives to posit the \u201cSmiley Face Theory,\u201d that a shadowy network of serial killers is targeting young men of this description nationwide. Castellani finds this theory, which has been widely debunked, decidedly unconvincing, but remains intrigued by the question of what, if anything, connects all these deaths.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Last Seen<\/em>, he investigates by plunging us deep into the consciousnesses of Caleb, Leo, Steven, and Matthew, four young men who are able to talk to each other, and others like them, in death. They hunt for patterns, posture, tell self-serving stories to one another and themselves, and look for evidence that they are being adequately mourned by the single loved one each can still see. They struggle to work out what, if anything, their brief lives meant. Time in the book moves as it does in Castellani\u2019s imagined afterlife: meaningful memories are captured in bright bursts of lucid narrative, mixed with murky, half-remembered fragments; past, present, and future are all constantly colliding. What emerges is a detailed topography of the boys\u2019 obsessions, a result of the pressures to perform certain kinds of masculinity colliding with their even deeper desires to love and be loved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Castellani and I met over Zoom to discuss the dangers of patriarchy and love, the allure of age gap relationships like the ones lost to his generation of gay men as a result of the AIDS crisis, and our fundamental unknowability to our beloveds and ourselves. Electric Lit readers in the Providence and Boston areas are invited to join us as we continue the conversation in person at An Unlikely Story<\/a> on Friday, February 20, 2026.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Preety Sidhu: In some ways, this book is a big tonal shift from your previous novel Leading Men<\/a><\/em>, yet about half of that<\/em> book takes place fifty years after the protagonist\u2019s death as a friend honors his memory. Last Seen<\/em> is also about four young men, watching from beyond the grave to see how their loved ones do and do not mourn them. Can you speak to your career-spanning interest in love that, specifically, transcends death? Why is it important how the people we love most remember us after we\u2019re gone?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Christopher Castellani:<\/strong> I\u2019ve always been drawn to retrospective narration because it allows a character to assess the whole breadth of their life. Looking back adds weight to the story. In some ways that\u2019s good, and it can be overwhelming to the writer to have to deal with an entire life. To me, that\u2019s what makes it most interesting, for people to evaluate what their lives meant to them and to the people who love them and who they love and who they hurt and who they want to do right by. It has always felt more compelling, narratively, than the decisions we make in the moment, where the reader doesn\u2019t know what the aftershocks are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Doing it from beyond the grave gives it even more weight, because all your choices are now over. In this book, they do try to make choices after death. They have some degree of power, but that is fairly limited and ineffectual. You don\u2019t know how long your life is going to be, so you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re going to leave to people in terms of their feelings and the unfinished business that you had. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: These guys are obsessing over whether the actions of the people they love most are sufficiently distraught. The actions of the living, the way their lives have been changed by the dead or by the sudden deaths\u2014why the fascination with that particular measure of a life? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC: <\/strong>It\u2019s about who\u2019s telling the story. Who knows these people best? Do the guys know themselves best? Or do the people they consider their most beloved, or the most intense relationship that they had? The answer is neither. Nobody knows themselves and nobody knows each other, and nobody is reliable in what they say about themselves or each other. The answer to how do you define or know a person is: you can\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I kept feeling these guys were lying to me as they were telling me their stories, and lying to themselves. The people they left behind construct them into something they wanted or needed them to be. The boys, now that they\u2019re gone, have no way to counter that. That has always been my obsession: how we construct ourselves, how others construct us, and how both are incomplete. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: The power of love is tethering people to each other across death, and even that\u2019s not enough. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

That has always been my obsession: how we construct ourselves, how others construct us, and how both are incomplete.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

CC: <\/strong>Exactly, and love obscures things. Love transforms things and creates things that aren\u2019t even there. That\u2019s both a cynical and a romantic view. Both sides in this book, the living and the dead, are guilty of doing both. I chose one person that the dead could look in on and interact with\u2014with whom they had the most intense love relationship\u2014because love both blurs and shapes the way that we see each other, and our relationships. We see it through that particular lens.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While I don\u2019t have some grand theory about it, I\u2014maybe childishly or romantically\u2014believe that love is the thing that breaks through whatever dividing line there is between this life and the next. I have a line about how the dead are busy, the dead are doing their thing and not really thinking about us. But there are times when we feel deeply connected, or our love for someone that we miss is so powerful that it has the effect of summoning them. I wanted to dramatize that. I\u2019m almost embarrassed to say that because it is so borderline cheesy, but I do on some level believe that. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: You open the book with an epigraph from Anne Carson about the dead walking behind us, which ends with: \u201cthey are victims of love, many of them.\u201d What does the phrase \u201cvictims of love\u201d mean to you, and how were you thinking about it as you wrote <\/strong>Last Seen<\/em><\/strong>? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC:<\/strong> That poem completely unlocked this book. It wasn\u2019t that I wrote the book, then went searching for an epigraph. It was with me from the beginning. I love Anne Carson, she\u2019s a genius.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was exploring how deeply feeling people\u2014when one of those emotions is love\u2014can\u2019t help but be victimized. It is more powerful than almost any other force. You can\u2019t help but be under its thumb, serving love more than love is serving you. That\u2019s what I was getting at with all the characters, in various ways. They\u2019re still under love\u2019s thumb, even in the afterlife. They\u2019re never free, even after they\u2019re gone. That\u2019s how powerful love is for these four guys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: How did you first encounter the unsolved deaths this novel is based on?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC:<\/strong> There was a case in Boston in 2017 of a young man named Michael Kelleher. He was missing for weeks, then ultimately found. I was drawn to the mystery of this disappearance. In one of the comments, somebody said, \u201cthis seems like a Smiley Face thing.\u201d I was like, \u201cwhat\u2019s that?\u201d I went down the rabbit hole.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s completely absurd to think that over the past thirty years there\u2019s been this network of people preying on these guys. I\u2019m more interested in why we think that these guys are somehow endangered. What about our psyche, particularly the American psyche, gets more excited that it\u2019s these types of guys who are being preyed upon or vulnerable? Obviously, we think about this type of person, in our American mindset, as leaders of America. Golden boys. The future. There\u2019s something particularly upsetting or fascinating to people, and also probably thrilling in a schadenfreude way, to seeing these strong, healthy, attractive men being taken down.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: What\u2019s your \u201ctheory\u201d on how they are connected as victims? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC:<\/strong> In that very way of being the \u201cgolden boy\u201d: that identity, that pressure, that set of expectations to be a certain way. They do have a kinship with each other\u2014young, ostensibly straight American men. Patriarchy has a lot of terms they may or may not have signed up for, but are born into. Most of them, not to generalize, perpetuate them, and fall easily into that role without questioning it. But I wanted to give these guys the dignity of an inner life, to treat them as three-dimensional people. Especially now, we have put all these guys into a box: this is who and what they are. I wanted to explore what made them and connected them psychically. That\u2019s why I have them able to communicate only with each other in this afterlife. Not because they\u2019re all victims of the Smiley Face Killer, but because they\u2019re all victims, in some way, of patriarchy. And of love.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: The real serial killers. <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC: <\/strong>Right, the real killers are patriarchy and love! Spoiler alert.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: Each of the dead young men can look in on the person they love most who\u2019s still alive. In all four cases, the relationships are intergenerational. What drew you to writing about age gap relationships?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC:<\/strong> I did not set out to write about age gap relationships. It weirdly just happened, it was subconscious. I did want to write about different types of love, both romantic and family relationships. I realized halfway through writing that all these relationships did have that commonality. The book doesn\u2019t have some grand theory about age gaps in general. It\u2019s only interested in each particular relationship.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Throughout history, there have been famous age gap relationships between men. When I was growing up, that was completely cut off.<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The one between James and Caleb\u2014a young gay man who is attracted almost exclusively to older men\u2014is a dynamic that comes up a lot in the gay male community. It\u2019s interesting in the age of social media and hookup apps, because when I was growing up I never remotely thought of a person older than 25 as an option. Not because of attraction, but because they were usually dying or dead or diseased. That was the mentality, that anyone over a certain age was a victim of AIDS, or potentially that. Throughout history, there have been famous age gap relationships between men, both mentor and romantic relationships. When I was growing up, that was completely cut off. Now we\u2019re seeing so many of these relationships, that are interesting for what attracts both sides. Other than the basic sexual chemistry, what do they get from each other? What do they need from each other? That was the thing I was exploring with James and Caleb, through the lens of Derrick, who is a survivor of that AIDS era.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also wanted to show the connection between these young men disappearing and the young men who were disappearing all through the AIDS crisis. I wanted to draw some link between those two kinds of disappearances of young, usually attractive, often-but-of-course-not-always white, men. These are who became the face of the AIDS epidemic: young, pretty, white men. Not that they were remotely the only people affected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: Matthew is obsessed with his college girlfriend Tessa\u2014some might even say stalking her\u2014but the person is able to see after death is his mother. What did you want to explore in the contrast between this obsessive love for a partner and the more enduring bond between mother and son?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC:<\/strong> The relationship between mothers and sons has been my most consistent writing obsession. He\u2019s half Italian, I\u2019m full Italian. I was thinking of the really strong relationships between mothers and sons in Italian families. This mother is not Italian, but she\u2019s in this Italian world of deeply passionate love among family members.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She\u2019s relatively cold, she\u2019s almost like a \u201cstage mother.\u201d There\u2019s the trope of mothers that have this kind of romance with their sons, like the \u201chockey mom,\u201d the \u201csoccer mom,\u201d the \u201cswim mom.\u201d They\u2019re with their son almost like their partner. There\u2019s this pride and a weird almost sexual vibe that I\u2019ve always found interesting. I wanted to explore that. She\u2019s never had a love relationship with her own husband. Her most \u201cromantic\u201d relationship, in a way, is with her son, which is why the enduring image she wants to have of him is with his head held high and his fists raised\u2014the strong, all-American scholar-athlete, the perfect son. That myth-making between mother and son is what I was interested in, from her side. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

From him, it\u2019s recognition. He\u2019s always wanted her to be a more nurturing mother, not putting him on a pedestal. To see him as more flawed, human, vulnerable. By dying, he\u2019s achieved that, and wants to know that she sees him. He\u2019s so upset when she walks by his picture and doesn\u2019t notice him anymore. Because he also has this stalker, \u201cextra\u201d tendency, he almost wants his mom to stalk him. That\u2019s the way he understands love, that kind of obsessiveness. Because she doesn\u2019t have that for him, he keeps trying to \u201cwin\u201d her, even from the afterlife. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: For Caleb and Steven, the people they love most, James and Monica, are older and married. What were you hoping to explore with these two affairs?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC: <\/strong>I think of James and Caleb as a legitimate love affair. James is trapped in his bisexual identity, not able to have that fully recognized and integrated into his life. I wanted to explore that trap, closeted life. It\u2019s narratively interesting to have a character who is leading a secret life\u2014the stories he tells himself to justify his behavior. Using love as a pretext for dishonest, bad behavior. He\u2019s cruising, he\u2019s lying to his wife, but with Caleb he\u2019s in love.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is love if not seeing the messiness?<\/p><\/blockquote><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

With Monica and Steven, from her side, I think of her as a trifler, a destructive force who doesn\u2019t understand the extent of her own power and privilege. She procures him, basically prostitutes him for herself. While she had tender and certainly sexual feelings for him, I do not think of that as a love relationship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

He does love her, and sees her as a more wounded person than she sees herself. He wanted to be<\/em> Arthur [her husband], because as a young, white American man, he felt like he should take over the world and saw Arthur as someone who had. He felt he<\/em> should be in that position. All that was entangled in that obsession. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: How much is it about love enabling bad behavior versus expressions of love being impeded by unfair societal restrictions?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

CC: <\/strong>I wonder whether the excuse for bad behavior is intrinsic to the love itself, part of the thrill. You can\u2019t discount the thrill that James, Caleb, Steven, Monica, and to some extent Matthew feel. The charge, the illicitness that goes into these relationships is what makes them so exciting. Like a lot of people in the queer community say, once we get too mainstream, it\u2019s not fun to be gay anymore. You almost need the constraints, the negative societal forces, to convince yourself and each other that you really do love each other, because you\u2019re working against all those forces.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t think that makes it any less legitimate. It\u2019s just part of the unique \u201clove package\u201d every relationship has. Some relationships don\u2019t have that, but they\u2019re all legitimate relationships in terms of the emotion and passion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They have different calibrations of things like, \u201chow much of this is transactional?\u201d and \u201cobsession?\u201d and \u201cegocentric?\u201d and \u201cfulfilling a need from childhood trauma?\u201d That is wrapped up in all of the relationships. No relationship is free of those. We all have things that draw us to each other in love, that could be considered negative or not healthy. All successful relationships have these dynamics that might be technically considered unhealthy but work for that relationship. We\u2019re all victims of love in a relationship that is sustained and passionate.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PS: In describing his affair with James, Caleb says, \u201cSeeing is a weird word to describe what we were doing, but it was also the perfect word.\u201d Obviously, \u201cseeing\u201d is important in <\/strong>Last Seen<\/em><\/strong>. The sections have headings like \u201cCrime Seen,\u201d \u201cFirst Seen,\u201d \u201cLast Seen,\u201d and \u201cLove Seen.\u201d Why is \u201cseeing\u201d such an important theme? <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n