Just a few pages into the book, a man crouches in the bushes outside his home, baseball bat in hand, waiting for a jogger to pass. The illustrated panels leave no doubt about his intentions.
A student in the Monadnock Regional School District checked out this book from the school library: “My Friend Dahmer,” a graphic memoir by cartoonist Derf Backderf. It follows Jeffrey Dahmer, a convicted serial killer, through his lonely teenage years and touches on his necrophilic fantasies.
After discovering that her child had borrowed the book from the school library, a mother wrote to the district to voice her concern that such a book was available to students.
In her view, it has “no place in the hands of middle school or high school children.”
“I believe the premise of the book is that if someone has friends or adults that care about them, they won’t become serial killers, and that just isn’t reality,” the parent wrote. “There are many children with abusive home lives, psychosis and fragile thinking. This book presents ideas they don’t need to know about.”
The parent pointed to one passage in particular, in which Dahmer, obsessed with a jogger, “fantasized about lying down next to his unconscious body, about fondling him and having total control over him.”
She cited other parts, like where it describes Dahmer’s dismemberment of his victims and how he masturbated over corpses.
“One of the cartoon photos shows a cat body nailed to a tree without its head, then the head was displayed on a spike,” she said.
The email is one of many that the Monitor obtained through public records requests sent to 23 school districts across New Hampshire. The requests were part of the Transparent New Hampshire project, a collaboration with MuckRock and the Granite State News Collaborative.
The requests asked school districts for emails from parents, sent between the 2023 and 2025 school years, expressing concerns about content their children were consuming.
The Monadnock Regional School District email thread doesn’t say what the school ultimately decided about the book, but a check of the library’s offerings shows this particular book is no longer available. But the library’s catalogue lists three other books about Dahmer.
Concord, Franklin and Hopkinton school districts did not receive any complaints.
Like the book “My Friend Dahmer,” many of the titles that draw parental objections contain explicit content or references to self-harm, violence and sexual acts. The New Hampshire Freedom to Read Coalition draws attention to some of these challenges during Banned Books Week.
The national campaign, held either during the last week of September or the first week of October, opposes book censorship.
“Public school libraries in the Granite State should open doors, not close them,” Deb Howes, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a statement this week. “Banned Books Week reminds us that censorship limits opportunities for students and undermines local decision-making. Protecting the freedom to read protects every public school student’s constitutional right to a robust education.”
During this year’s legislative session, lawmakers made another attempt to change how schools handle book challenges. Senate Bill 434 would have required school boards to revise their policies so that parents could more easily request the removal of books and other materials from schools.
Gov. Kelly Ayotte vetoed the bill.
“As a parent, I understand and appreciate the concerns parents have about their children being exposed to age-inappropriate or objectionable materials in schools,” Ayotte wrote in her veto message in July. “At the same time, existing New Hampshire law already requires school districts to adopt a policy allowing an exception to specific course material based on a parent’s determination that the material is objectionable.”
Reading choices
“My Friend Dahmer” has been challenged in New Hampshire and in many other states, according to the American Library Association (ALA).
Another title, “This Book Is Gay,” a non-fiction guide by Juno Dawson, has faced multiple challenges here and elsewhere, and has been banned from some school libraries across the country.
In New Hampshire, This Book Is Gay was challenged twice, according to ALA’s book ban data.
In an email to Belmont High School staff, a parent said the book “simplifies and normalizes sexual acts that seem inappropriate for teens and even some adults.”
Benjamin Russell, the school librarian, noted in an email that the parent had found the book by searching the library catalogue for controversial titles.
The book includes several pages written as a guide for young adults exploring sexuality and gender identity, along with an instructional section for LGBTQ+ readers on giving and receiving pleasure through penetration, oral and manual stimulation.
“If my children were ever to have access to this, I would 100% expect to have my parental signature and approval for it,” the parent wrote.
After hearing the parent’s concern, Belmont High School Principal Matthew Finch wrote to Russell to acknowledge that the text of 11 pages outlines “sexual acts, including instructions on how to perform such acts.”
In an email to the parent, Finch wrote that the superintendent and school board met to review the district’s policies for selecting instructional and library materials, but “it was determined that we would not make recommended changes to the current policies associated with the selection process.”
In the fall of 2025, the Merrimack Valley School District removed “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” a 1999 coming-of-age novel that includes descriptions of sexual assault, consensual sex and drug use, as well as a reference to an abortion.
It is also one of the most frequently banned books across the country.
Among the records released in response to the Transparent New Hampshire public records request for objections to instructional and library materials in school districts between the 2023 and 2025 school years, some of the titles that parents raised concerns about included “Bride,” “All Boys Aren’t Blue,” and “Heartstopper.”
“Heartstopper” is a graphic novel series about the coming-of-age of two teenage boys and explores LGBTQ+ themes. “All Boys Aren’t Blue” is a collection of personal essays in which an LGBTQ+ activist reflects on their childhood, adolescence and college years in New Jersey and Virginia. “Bride” is a paranormal romance between a Vampire bride and an Alpha werewolf.
In Nashua, a parent flagged “Summer of the Mariposas” by Guadalupe García McCall over its content involving “witchcraft.”
In the Bow school district, a parent objected to the instructional use of the film Iron Jawed Angels about the women’s suffrage movement starring Hilary Swank.
In most cases, the district’s action in response to a parent complaint is not clear.
“Efforts to limit those choices and censor books written by mostly Black, brown, and LGBTQ+ authors—whether in Congress, at the State House, or in our local schools and libraries—deny students the ability to see themselves and understand our similarities and our differences,” said Megan Tuttle, President of NEA-New Hampshire, in a statement. “This Banned Books Week, we’re standing in solidarity with everyone fighting to ensure every student has to look no further than the shelves of their own school libraries to find age-appropriate books that show they are reflected and respected.”
While public libraries don’t face as many challenges as school libraries, Kaitlin Camidge, the library director in Bow, said that Banned Books Week in public libraries still matters because it draws attention to the importance of access to books.
Without that access, she said, something fundamental is at risk.
“What stands to be lost is the concept of books as windows and mirrors,” said Camidge. “When you read or view something, you learn something new about somebody else’s perspective or lived experience, or gather information that you hadn’t reflected on or had before. Every book doesn’t need to be read by every person, but every book probably has somebody that it brings value to.”
