Fiend
Authors: Harold Schechter
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #General, #Biography & Autobiography
Acclaim for
HAROLD SCHECHTER,
“America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers”
(The Boston Book Review)
BESTIAL
The Savage Trail of a True American Monster
“Yet another essential addition to Schechter’s canon of serial murder history. . . . Deserves to be read and pored over by the hard crime enthusiast as well as devotees of social history.”
—The Boston Book Review
“Bestial
spare[s] no graphic detail. . . . Reads like fast-paced fiction, complete with action, plot twists, suspense, and eerie foreshadowing. . . . Provides chilling insights into the motivations of a man who killed for killing’s sake.”
—Amazon.com
“[A] deftly written, unflinching account.”
—Journal Star
(Peoria, IL)
DEPRAVED
The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer
“Must reading for crime buffs. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.”
—Ann Rule, bestselling author of . . .
And Never Let Her Go
“A meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed and above all riveting account of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century serial killer. . . . Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.”
—Caleb Carr, bestselling author of
The Alienist
DERANGED
The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer
“Reads like fiction but it’s chillingly real. . . . What Albert Fish did . . . would chill the bones of Edgar Allan Poe.”
—
The Philadelphia Inquirer
DEVIANT
The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho”
“[A] grisly, wonderful book. . . . A scrupulously researched and complexly sympathetic biography of the craziest killer in American history.”
—
Film Quarterly
THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS
by Harold Schechter and David Everitt
“[A] grisly tome. . . . Schechter knows his subject matter.”
—
Denver Rocky Mountain News
Praise for Harold Schechter’s masterful historical novel featuring Edgar Allan Poe
NEVERMORE
“Caleb Carr and Tom Holland are going to have some competition for turf in the land of historical literary crime fiction.”
—
The Boston Book Review
“Authentic . . . engaging. . . . Schechter manages at once to be faithful to Poe’s voice, and to poke gentle fun at it—to swing breezily between parody and homage.”
—
The Sun
(Baltimore)
“A page-turner. . . . Deftly recreates 1830s Baltimore and brings Poe to life.”
—
Richmond Times-Dispatch
“[A] tantalizing tale full of tongue twisters and terror. . . . A literary confection to be read, discussed, and savored by lovers of puzzles and language, this is also a first-rate mystery.”
—
Booklist
“Schechter . . . recounts the legendary author’s brush with real-life homicide as one of Poe’s own protagonists would—with morbid, scientific rapture . . . plenty of suspense and nicely integrated background details.”
—
Publishers Weekly
“Wonderful. . . . I highly recommend
Nevermore.
I had more fun with this book than any I have read in a long time.”
—
Denver Rocky Mountain News
“Schechter does a good job of re-creating Poe’s phantasmagoric style.”
—
San Antonio Express-News
“In this gripping, suspenseful thriller, Harold Schechter does a spendid job of capturing the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe. I’m sure my late, great cousin would have loved
Nevermore.”
—Anne Poe Lehr
“Schechter’s entertaining premise is supported by rich period atmospherics and a plot that keeps the finger of suspicion wandering until the very end.”
—
The New York Times Book Review
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Contents
For my friends
Miklos, Lisa, Andrei, and Alex
The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.
—Genesis 8:21
P
ROLOGUE
The level of actual violence as measured by homicide . . . has never been lower. . . . It may seem that we live in violent times, but even the famously gentle Bushmen of the Kalahari have a homicide rate that eclipses those of the most notorious American cities. All appearances to the contrary, we who live in today’s industrial societies stand a better chance of dying peacefully in our beds than any of our predecessors anywhere.
—Lyall Watson,
Dark Nature
T
he longing for a bygone age—for a time when life was slower, sweeter, simpler—is such a basic human impulse that it often blinds us to the fact that the “good old days” were a lot worse than we imagine.
Living at a time of pervasive pollution, we yearn for those delightful preautomotive days when the air was free of car exhaust—forgetting that the streets of every major nineteenth-century city reeked of horse piss, manure, and the decomposing carcasses of worked-to-death nags. Reading about the pathetic state of public education, we grow teary-eyed for the age of the “Little Red Schoolhouse”—completely unaware of the deplorable conditions of nineteenth-century classrooms (according to one authoritative source, “a survey of Brooklyn schools in 1893 listed eighteen classes with 80 to 100 students; one class had 158”). Affronted by the nonstop barrage of media violence, we pine for a return to a more civilized time—conveniently forgetting that, a hundred years ago, public hangings were a popular form of family entertainment, and that turn-of-the-century “penny papers” routinely ran illustrated, front-page stories about axe-murders, sex-killings, child-torture, and other ghastly crimes.
Clearly, there is some abiding human need to imagine the past as a paradise—a golden age of innocence from which we have been tragically expelled. But a dispassionate look at the historical
facts suggests that there are few, if any, contemporary problems—from gang violence to drug use to tabloid sensationalism—that didn’t plague the past. And often, in more dire and insidious forms.
For those Miniver Cheevys among us who are convinced that they inhabit the worst of times, one irrefutable sign of present-day degeneracy is the terrifying rise in vicious juvenile crime. And in truth, the past few years have witnessed a string of particularly savage murders committed by children. The whole world was aghast in 1993 when two ten-year-old British boys named Jon Venables and Robert Thompson abducted three-year-old James Bulger from a Liverpool shopping center, then led him to a remote stretch of railroad line, where they tortured him to death before placing his mangled remains on the tracks to be cut in half by the next passing train.