#MurderFunding

Overview

Gretchen McNeil's #MurderFunding drops readers into a near-future entertainment landscape where a competition series called Who Wants to Be a Painiac? turns manufactured murder into must-watch television. Contestants compete to become the next breakout killer on a fictional network built around choreographed carnage, all of it framed as harmless spectacle for a public hungry for gore.

Seventeen-year-old Becca Martinello has no interest in any of this until her ordinary, soccer-mom mother dies unexpectedly and a mysterious girl named Stef arrives with an unsettling claim: Becca's mother was secretly Molly Mauler, one of the show's most adored killers. Chasing answers about a parent she thought she knew, Becca is pulled into the world of the program herself.

What begins as a search for the truth behind her mother's double life curdles into something far more dangerous once contestants start dying for real, blurring the line between performance and murder and forcing Becca to question whether she can walk away from the show at all.

Behind the Cameras

McNeil, who has built a career pairing horror premises with sharp comic timing in books like Get Even and Ten, uses #MurderFunding to needle a culture that has turned true crime into lifestyle content. The show-within-the-book satirizes the way real violence gets packaged, branded, and monetized for viewers who insist they know the difference between entertainment and reality even as that line keeps moving.

The novel also sits within a broader wave of YA thrillers that use reality-competition framing to explore inherited trauma and identity — Becca's story is as much about reckoning with a parent's hidden past as it is about surviving a game show. By making the villain of the piece an entire media apparatus rather than a single killer, the book positions its horror as a symptom of audience appetite rather than an isolated aberration.

Why #MurderFunding Has Been Challenged

Objections to #MurderFunding center on its horror content: depictions of murder, staged violence that turns lethal, and a premise built around a serial-killer competition are the recurring concerns raised by those seeking its removal from library and classroom shelves. Critics argue the book's central conceit — violence packaged as entertainment — is itself too graphic or disturbing for the age group it targets, even as the novel uses that same conceit to critique real-world media consumption of true crime. Within the scope of challenges tracked in this catalog, the title has been challenged in one state and one district.