Deviant: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original Psycho

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Description

The truth in the back of the twisted crimes that inspired the films Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs…

From “The us’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic killers” (The Boston Book Review) comes the definitive account of Ed Gein, a mild-mannered Wisconsin farmhand who stunned an unsuspecting nation—and redefined the meaning of the word “psycho.” The year was 1957. The place was an unusual farmhouse in The us’s heartland, filled with unusual evidence of unthinkable depravity. The man in the back of the massacre was a slight, unassuming Midwesterner with a bizarre smile—and even stranger attachment to his domineering mother. After her death and a failed attempt to dig up his mother’s body from the local cemetery, Gein turned to other grave robberies and, ultimately, multiple murders. Driven to commit gruesome and odd acts beyond all imagining, Ed Gein remains probably the most deranged minds in the annals of American homicide. This is his story—recounted in fascinating and chilling detail by Harold Schechter, probably the most acclaimed true-crime storytellers of our time.
Harold Schechter is a historian: he takes old files and yellowed newspaper clippings, and brings their stories to life. Deviant is about everyone’s favorite ghoul, Ed Gein–whose crimes inspired the writers of Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the Lambs. Schechter deftly evokes the small-town 1950s Wisconsin setting–not pretty farms and cheese factories, but infertile soil and a bleak, hardscrabble existence. The details of Gein’s “death house” are perhaps well known by now, but the murderer’s quietly crazy, almost gentle personality comes forth in this book as never before. As Gary Kadet wrote, in The Boston Book Review, “Schechter is a dogged researcher [who backs up] every odd detail and curious twist in this and his other books … More importantly, he nimbly avoids miring his writing and our reading with minutiae or researched overstatement, because of this that despite the fact that he can infrequently be dry, he is never boring.”
Also recommended: Schechter’s books about Albert Fish (Deranged) and Herman Mudgett a.k.a. Dr. H. H. Holmes (Depraved).

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