Thursday 12 October 2017

Deviant The shocking true story of Ed Gein by Harold Schechter

Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original "Psycho" by Harold Schechter
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Time taken to read - on and off over 2 days

Pages - 242

Publisher - Gallery Books

Blurb fro Goodreads

From Harold Schechter, “America's principle chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers” (The Boston Book Review), comes the definitive account of Ed Gein, whose ghoulish crimes stunned an unsuspecting nation.

The year is 1957. Photographs would show him across the country: a slight, Midwestern man with a twisted little smile, a man who had lived for ten years in his own world of murder and depravity.

Here is the grisly true story of Ed Gein, the killer whose fiendish fantasies inspired Alfred Hitchcock's “Psycho”—the mild-mannered farmhand bound to his domineering mother, driven into a series of gruesome and bizarre acts beyond all imagining. In chilling detail, Deviant explores the incredible career of one of the most twisted madmen in the annals of American crime—and how he turned a small Wisconsin farmhouse into his own private playground of ghoulishness and blood.




My Review

Ed Gein was a quiet man who helped out about town and sometimes maybe got his good will taken advantage of. So when woman went missing in his small town no one would have thought to look at him, evidence came to light and Ed was questioned, leading the police to find horrors in his house that shook the world!

True crime can be stranger than fiction, the case of Ed Gein went on to inspire fiction such as the killer in Silence of the Lambs and the character from Psycho, Norman Bates. The story of Ed Gein is not for the faint hearted and really uncomfortable to read, worse so because you know it is fact. They discuss another killer and highlight some necrophilia, sexual deviancy and the things they found in Gein's house. It is the thought that one human being can commit such atrocities to another and integrate with society as if nothing had happened.

This is a book that will haunt the reader, how it is written so you can visualize the horrors that the police found, graphic details leaving no room for doubt. This is one of the darkest true crime books I have read, I think because the acts were so heinous, the missed opportunities and contact people had with him. Then of course all that transpired after he was caught, the book also examines his upbringing and relationships with his family. His mother was a "unique" woman, religious and had a hard line on the way her boys should be attributing to Ed's isolation and ability to form relationships. It is one of the crime stories that shook America and years later it continues to shock anyone who reads it. The writing flows and it is a hard book to put down, even though you really really want to, 4/5 for me. Absolutely not for the faint hearted guys, read this one with caution.

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1 comment:

  1. I had heard of Gein but I was only remotely familiar with his crimes.This sounds fascinating. At the same time I might find it too disturbing. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that people are capable of such things.

    ReplyDelete


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