Chilling Tales of Men, Women and Murder : WOMEN WHO LOVE MEN WHO KILL, <i> by Sheila Isenberg,</i> Simon & Schuster, $19.95, 240 pages

“Why is there no book on ‘Men Who Love Women Who Kill” I mused aloud as my 13-year-old son and I walked out into the sunlight after seeing “Thelma and Louise.”

Christopher, perhaps a little edgy after watching Susan Sarandon armed, replied: “Because men are too smart.”

I hate to admit the boy may be on to something. But John Wayne Gacy, David Berkowitz (Son of Sam), and both Hillside Stranglers have found women falling in love with them, post-conviction. While many women offered Ted Bundy marriage proposals, Jean Harris, as far as I know, has not received any. This would indicate that, if not smarter, exactly, men are certainly more self-protective.

“Women Who Love Men Who Kill,” as its irresistible title suggests, has plenty of interesting stuff about extremes of feminine self-sacrifice and self-delusion. As the title also indicates, Isenberg’s book is much in the same line as the pop-psych zillion-seller, “Women Who Love Too Much” by Robin Norwood, who observed that prison wives “represent perhaps the ultimate example of women who love too much.”

“Women Who Love Men Who Kill” does not go deeper into the phenomenon or into any one couple’s story than Oprah-speak. It is not a scientific study. Isenberg, a former reporter and now an aide to a New York state assemblywoman, prefaces conclusions with: “Most of these women,” or “Many of the women I talked to . . . .” She has changed some but not all of the names and locations, leaving the reader adrift in a sea of Marias and Tinas and Phils and Duanes. For scientific input, she quotes a passel of psychologists who don’t seem to have met the people they’re discussing.

The book is badly organized so that subjects pop up again when you thought you’d finished with them. And it is awkwardly written. But what’s interesting in Isenberg’s observations is that women who fall in love with murderers are not so much playing with the dark side of the force--the Demon Lover--as they are looking for an ideal love. The fact that the man has killed someone, whether in a fit of passion or a fit of nervousness while robbing a gas station, provides a certain spice. But, although Isenberg asserts purple-ly that these women are “spinning dizzily in a dance with a master of death,” most of her evidence indicates that the really appealing quality of these men as love-object material is that they’re behind bars.

Of Phil (not his real name), she writes, “He is an excellent listener because, in essence, he is a captive audience.” I’d say Phil is captive in more than his essence. “Phil is totally there for her,” Isenberg observes. Totally.

Murderers do pay you a lot of attention, they obviously need the love of a good woman, and they don’t do that irritating thing of talking about other women they’re seeing.

The women Isenberg interviewed are mostly women who have been made to feel that they deserve to suffer. Many have been married to alcoholics. Many have been beaten. There’s some logic in connecting yourself to a dangerous man who can’t get at you.

The women fork over much of their income for the imprisoned lover’s legal expenses as they deny their lover’s guilt. They believe him when he says the gun went off accidentally. One woman believes it was a mistake that her lover beat an old man to death and then tried to decapitate him with a saw.

Of all the women Isenberg interviewed, only one had achieved the objective they all said they sought--to get her man free and then marry him. Fran, a nurse, became fascinated when she read David’s letters to the editor in the Houston Post. He’d been in prison 14 years for the murder of his mother and father.

Isenberg’s women are foolish and her men are manipulative. Her women aren’t even in love. “They absolutely don’t love too much,” she writes, “They don’t really love at all.” It’s very true that women are foolishly attracted to men with interesting problems. And being a murderer, even if the actual crime was pathetic and sordid as most murders are, is an interesting problem.

Men are not attracted to women with interesting problems. You very rarely hear a man say, “Yes, she’s an alcoholic, but I’m just the one to save her.”

But love affairs, even in this extreme outer wing of the love-affair department, come in many variations of motive and intensity. Isenberg flattens out and denies the differences, and makes an interesting subject dull.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Broken Vessels” by Andre Dubus (David R. Godine).