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A review by book_concierge
Deviant by Harold Schechter
3.0
The subtitle is all the synopsis anyone needs: The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho”.
The residents of Plainfield Wisconsin were more than a little concerned when the owner of a local tavern disappeared in December 1955. She was a middle-aged woman with a no-nonsense attitude and a somewhat mysterious past, but who would want to kill her? Yet the evidence was clear: a pool a blood on the floor, a spent .32-caliber cartridge nearby, and a bloody trail indicating the body had been dragged out the door to a spot in the parking lot where presumably it was loaded into a truck.
Nearly two years later another middle-aged store-owner disappeared from Plainfield. But this time authorities quickly honed in on the mild-mannered little man whom everyone thought of as odd but harmless. What they found at Ed Gein’s farmhouse, however, would shock not only the residents of Plainfield, but the entire nation. The gruesome case captured the attention of a novelist, who wrote Psycho based on Gein’s story, and that captured the attention of Alfred Hitchcock.
Schechter writes a detailed account of Gein’s upbringing (as best as he could re-create it), the events and suspicions of the townspeople, his trial and his life in a mental institution. I was too young to know the details at the time the crimes were committed, but I vividly remember the renewed interest when Gein passed away. I’ve always like “true crime” books, and this is a pretty good, though not great, example of the genre.
The residents of Plainfield Wisconsin were more than a little concerned when the owner of a local tavern disappeared in December 1955. She was a middle-aged woman with a no-nonsense attitude and a somewhat mysterious past, but who would want to kill her? Yet the evidence was clear: a pool a blood on the floor, a spent .32-caliber cartridge nearby, and a bloody trail indicating the body had been dragged out the door to a spot in the parking lot where presumably it was loaded into a truck.
Nearly two years later another middle-aged store-owner disappeared from Plainfield. But this time authorities quickly honed in on the mild-mannered little man whom everyone thought of as odd but harmless. What they found at Ed Gein’s farmhouse, however, would shock not only the residents of Plainfield, but the entire nation. The gruesome case captured the attention of a novelist, who wrote Psycho based on Gein’s story, and that captured the attention of Alfred Hitchcock.
Schechter writes a detailed account of Gein’s upbringing (as best as he could re-create it), the events and suspicions of the townspeople, his trial and his life in a mental institution. I was too young to know the details at the time the crimes were committed, but I vividly remember the renewed interest when Gein passed away. I’ve always like “true crime” books, and this is a pretty good, though not great, example of the genre.