Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers
    Unavailable
    The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers
    Unavailable
    The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers
    Ebook730 pages10 hours

    The Serial Killer Files: The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers

    By Harold Schechter

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    Listen to the audiobook instead

    About this ebook

    THE DEFINITIVE DOSSIER ON HISTORY’S MOST HEINOUS!

    Hollywood’s make-believe maniacs like Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal Lecter can’t hold a candle to real life monsters like John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and scores of others who have terrorized, tortured, and terminated their way across civilization throughout the ages. Now, from the much-acclaimed author of Deviant, Deranged, and Depraved, comes the ultimate resource on the serial killer phenomenon.

    Rigorously researched and packed with the most terrifying, up-to-date information, this innovative and highly compelling compendium covers every aspect of multiple murderers–from psychology to cinema, fetishism to fan clubs, “trophies” to trading cards. Discover:

    WHO THEY ARE: Those featured include Ed Gein, the homicidal mama’s boy who inspired fiction’s most famous Psycho, Norman Bates; Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, sex-crazed killer cousins better known as the Hillside Stranglers; and the Beanes, a fifteenth-century cave-dwelling clan with an insatiable appetite for human flesh

    HOW THEY KILL: They shoot, stab, and strangle. Butcher, bludgeon, and burn. Drown, dismember, and devour . . . and other methods of massacre too many and monstrous to mention here.

    WHY THEY DO IT: For pleasure and for profit. For celebrity and for “companionship.” For the devil and for dinner. For the thrill of it, for the hell of it, and because “such men are monsters, who live . . . beyond the frontiers of madness.”

    PLUS: in-depth case studies, classic killers’ nicknames, definitions of every kind of deviance and derangement, and much, much more.

    For more than one hundred profiles of lethal loners and killer couples, Bluebeards and black widows, cannibals and copycats– this is an indispensable, spine-tingling, eye-popping investigation into the dark hearts and mad minds of that twisted breed of human whose crimes are the most frightening . . . and fascinating.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateDec 30, 2003
    ISBN9780345472007
    Author

    Harold Schechter

    Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature and culture. Renowned for his true-crime writing, he is the author of the nonfiction books Fatal, Fiend, Bestial, Deviant, Deranged, Depraved, and, with David Everitt, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. He is also the author of Nevermore and The Hum Bug, the acclaimed historical novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe. He lives in New York State.

    Read more from Harold Schechter

    Related to The Serial Killer Files

    Related ebooks

    Serial Killers For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Vanishing of Reality

      Aug 1, 2018

      The Vanishing of Reality
      8 min read

    • Article

      An Aneurism of Axe Murders: On ‘The Man from the Train’

      Oct 9, 2017

      You can’t help but read these murders as a parable of alienation. The lone drifter stalking the country by train, itself a mode of transport from a bygone era, to literally smash apart families with an instrument that evoked America’s timbered fronti

      6 min read

    • Article

      Charlottesville, Brexit, and Trump: From News Cycle To Novel

      Aug 10, 2018

      On the morning of Sunday, August 12th, 2017, around 500 white supremacists began to assemble in Emancipation Park, Charlottesville, Virginia for the Unite the Right rally. The group, which included armed militias, Klansmen and members of the alt-righ

      5 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Sep 20, 2019

      Reviews
      6 min read

    • Article

      How Horror Changed After WWI

      Oct 31, 2018

      How Horror Changed After WWI
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois

      Feb 14, 2018

      The Soul of W. E. B. Du Bois
      15 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Apr 20, 2023

      Reviews
      6 min read

    • Article

      5 Books Making News This Week: Brexit, Blacklists, and Biographies

      Feb 28, 2017

      Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money, Zachary Roth’s The Great Suppression and Gary Younge’s Another Day in the Death of America are named finalists for the J. Anthony Lukas Boo

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Brief History of Witch Hunts

      Dec 1, 2017

      1500s-1600s: Social upheaval and sectarianism lead to witch trials across Europe—tens of thousands are executed. Older women, outcasts, and healers are particularly vulnerable. The trials, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English note in their book Wit

      2 min read

    • Article

      Lost Souls

      May 1, 2018

      Lost Souls
      4 min read

    • Article

      Memoirs Of A Microaggressor

      Nov 26, 2020

      TO UNDERSTAND OUr current moment, start with public apologies. Darren Walker, president of the Ford Foundation, surely thought he was on safe ground when he came out in favour of delaying a Philip Guston exhibition because it included depictions of t

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Ed Simon

      Dec 5, 2021

      Each of these books taxonomizes the passing of anything that even remotely looked like it could be described naively as the "American Dream." The post A Year in Reading: Ed Simon appeared first on The Millions.

      19 min read

    • Article

      History

      Apr 3, 2024

      Viking, 464pp, £20 In this follow-up to his 2021 bestseller Empireland, wrote Andrew Marr in the Times, Sanghera ‘tries to understand why the modern British display such amnesia about their forebears’ vast, world-changing project.’ Although the book

      11 min read

    • Article

      'Neruda' Plumbs The Man Behind The Legend

      Apr 10, 2018

      Although Eisner's fascination with the celebrated poet sometimes lapses into hagiography, he frankly chronicles Neruda’s dark side.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Building A Fortean Library

      Dec 3, 2020

      It wasn’t just the Beatles, you know. On Merseyside in the 1960s another group of irreverent young men coalesced around an iconoclastic idea, and with rather more intellectual heft than the admittedly slightly better-known, and better-earning, moptop

      7 min read

    • Article

      Society

      Sep 20, 2023

      Society
      6 min read

    • Article

      Literary Deaths of 2022

      Dec 29, 2022

      In 2022, we mourned the deaths of many literary giants who remained under-celebrated in their lifetimes. These are some of them. With his eye patch and no-bullshit demeanor, Andrew Vachss was a man on a mission. He was an author of hard-boiled fictio

      13 min read

    • Article

      International Books

      Jan 13, 2020

      Imagining the world in the first century AD (not yet called that), it’s difficult to envision Christianity (not yet called that) when it was considered a “blasphemous cult”. It’s 35AD in Jerusalem and Saul, a Jew, is hunting down Christians for execu

      5 min read

    Reviews for The Serial Killer Files

    3.5/5

    2 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words