They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. ("This be the Verse) THUS PHILIP LARKIN on the topic of parental guidance. There is, of course, a way to limit the damage parents do us. We can always kill them. Larkin`s grimly sardonic lines supply a fair summary of Elliott Leyton`s Sole Survivors: Children Who Murder Their Families. The Memorial University anthropologist considers that the faults that mums and dads accumulate derive from the complex interplay of history, biology, psychology, and sociology. An unexceptional view, except that Leyton adds a spin of his own. He dismisses the claim that most family annihilations are caused by mental illness, biological disorder, or physical or sexual abuse of the child. Nor does he clap handcuffs on the paternalism (a word which he finds to be more exact than patriarchy) that some feminists believe to be a prime disseminator of family violence. All, he believes, may contribute; none are central. No, he speculates that the overheated home that typically lends itself to (die uncouthly termed) "familicide" is fuelled by the industrial revolution: The modem era is more than just the triumph of the bourgeois, the commissar, and the ayatollab: it is also the dizzying expansion of newly created and hierarchically ranked occupations. The social mobility that enabled many to climb all those new corporate ladders helped liberate those enslaved by family, race, religion, and gender. But it also produced corrosive envy, searing expectations, blistering anxiety. The nouveaux riches or the nouveaux pauvres have been the ones most savagely scarred. Familicide is a modern, "middle-class form of murder" and ...the killings tend to occur in niches in the social structure (especially the aspiring middle classes) in which parents may become heavily dependent on their children for their own social needs. So intense may this reversed dependence become that the parents begin, often quite unconsciously, to obliterate the identity, to deny the autonomy of their developing child so that the child may be used as the vehicle for their own aspirations. If such a family restricts the options of the child to the point where there appears to be no escape from the parental regime, and if the familial culture encodes violence and duplicity the child may form the impression that the only escape from his or her obliteration is through the annihilation of the family. Leyton`s annihilators typically lack remorse or the ability to lie effectively they are easy pickings for a homicide detective. Steven Benson, inept at business but handy with detonators, blew up his millionaire mother and brother and severely wounded his sister. Harry De La Roche, Jr., gunned down his parents and two brothers ostensibly because he didn`t want to return to military college. Another Jr., Butch DeFeo, from a thieving, feuding Coney Island family, killed his parents and four brothers and sisters with a lever-action Marlin rifle. Marlene Olive, an Ecuadorian immigrant to California, got her bewitched boyfriend to hack and bludgeon to death her alcoholic mother and Micawber-like father. She may or may not have helped. Do these and other illustrations prove Leyton`s rather massive point? No, but then again the author is more tentative, even humbler, dim in his previous book, Hunting Humans, which analysed the serial killers of strangers. He has to be: international statistics about familicides are thin, scattered, and incompetently gathered. We can say that parents, or at least fathers, are much more likely to kill their families than vice versa, which makes one puzzled as to why Leyton the generalizer focuses on the few Lizzie Bordens. Sole Survivor also contains some inconsistencies and a certain amount of stacking the evidence: witnesses who confirm his findings receive pats on the head as "insightful." He treats some murderers` recapitulations scornfully, accepts others as gospel. Refreshingly, he makes no apology for relying heavily on true-crime accounts even if his own book - with its copious footnotes and Seal`s miniature print - doesn`t attain a Joe McGinnis or Joseph Wambaugh level of readability. Yet such popular attributes chime oddly with his scholarly sources. Leyton, who warns that being a parent is a hard job under the best of circumstances, dedicates his book to his "beloved sons" and "adored grandson" So say we all.