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    Summary and Analysis of Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho: Based on the Book by Harold Schechter
    Summary and Analysis of Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho: Based on the Book by Harold Schechter
    Summary and Analysis of Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho: Based on the Book by Harold Schechter
    Ebook59 pages41 minutes

    Summary and Analysis of Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho: Based on the Book by Harold Schechter

    By Worth Books

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    About this ebook

    So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho” tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Harold Schechter’s book.
     
    Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.
     
    This short summary and analysis of Deviant includes:
    • Historical context
    • Chapter-by-chapter overviews
    • Profiles of the main characters
    • Detailed timeline of key events
    • Important quotes and analysis
    • Fascinating trivia
    • Glossary of terms
    • Supporting material to enhance your understanding of the original work
    About Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho” by Harold Schechter:
     
    This true-crime classic profiles Ed Gein, the murderer and grave robber whose crimes inspired the films Psycho, The Silence of the Lambs, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
     
    Ed Gein was a mildmannered midwestern farmhand—until his horrific crimes were uncovered. After a failed attempt to dig up the grave of his dead mother, Gein became a grave robber and then a murderer. What he did with the bodies of his victims was disturbing and gory beyond all imagination, and it leaves no doubt about what Ed Gein really was: the original psycho.
     
    The summary and analysis in this ebook are intended to complement your reading experience and bring you closer to a great work of nonfiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateApr 4, 2017
    ISBN9781504044905
    Summary and Analysis of Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho: Based on the Book by Harold Schechter
    Author

    Worth Books

    Worth Books’ smart summaries get straight to the point and provide essential tools to help you be an informed reader in a busy world, whether you’re browsing for new discoveries, managing your to-read list for work or school, or simply deepening your knowledge. Available for fiction and nonfiction titles, these are the book summaries that are worth your time.  

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      Book preview

      Summary and Analysis of Deviant - Worth Books

      Contents

      Context

      Overview

      Summary

      Timeline

      Cast of Characters

      Direct Quotes and Analysis

      Trivia

      What’s That Word?

      About Harold Schechter

      For Your Information

      Bibliography

      Copyright

      Context

      In 1989, when Deviant was first published, the man who inspired Alfred Hitchcock’s film Psycho was not at the forefront of the public’s consciousness. Ed Gein had already been dead five years, and the precise and horrifying details of his mid-century crimes—murder, grave robbing, corpse mutilation, fashioning masks and even a vest from the skin of female corpses—had been largely forgotten. Viewers of the 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs were likely unaware that the psychopath known as Buffalo Bill who seeks to make a full-body suit from female flesh also contained echoes of Gein.

      In his work as a writer and as a professor at City University of New York, serial-killer specialist Harold Schechter has extensively explored the intersection of violence, pop culture, and the social zeitgeist. A prolific chronicler, he is fascinated by the way so-called normal people are drawn to tales of such deviants, compelled to dissect their acts and motives as thoroughly as Gein might have dissected a body. The author’s work delves into the way these psychologically aberrant acts become part of folklore—and how every generation finds a pop-culture monster upon which to hang the blame, unwilling to accept that this darkness might be part of the human psyche itself.

      Schechter wrote Deviant during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, in which child-care workers were accused of abusing children during Satanic rituals. He points out that at least one amateur sociologist attributed Gein’s crimes to the pernicious influence of true-crime magazines. Today, he might observe parallels to the way heavy metal music was said to have corrupted the later-exonerated West Memphis Three; how Marilyn Manson was blamed for 1999’s Columbine High School shooting; or how video games are linked to violent crimes. Deviant, then, is not only a character study of a man who committed some of the most unthinkable crimes known to human society, but a portrait of the mid-twentieth-century American culture that both reviled and, on some level, exalted him.

      Overview

      In the middle of the twentieth century, the Midwest was usually perceived as an idyllic slice of America. But in the small, hardscrabble farm town of Plainfield, Wisconsin, one man was committing crimes that were unimaginably depraved.

      His name was Ed Gein. He had grown up with a domineering, fanatically religious mother, Augusta Gein, who instilled in him the belief that women were wicked and sinful. Physical contact with them—particularly outside marriage—was filthy and immoral. Paradoxically, Ed both revered his mother as a paradigm of virtue and resented her ironclad grip on his life. If the idea of a murderer fixated on

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