I, Monster

May 15, 2010
Veteran grim-lit readers may have noticed a recent uptick in the number of books plumbing the depths of all-star fiends (Henry Lee Lucas, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, etc.). Philbin has assembled a tribute to serial killers a little different in presentation and attribution: the words in it are direct quotations from the letters, confessions, trial transcripts and the like of the blood-stained miscreants themselves. Each chapter begins with a career summary of a single slaughterer and his crimes (all the subjects are male, except for Aileen Wuornos). Coverage reaches back in time to Jack the Ripper and H. H. Holmes and includes lesser-known psychopaths Westley Allan Dodd and Edmund Kemper along with such more familiar homicides as David Berkowitz and Albert Fish. A good many of these human-hunters narratives are extremely disturbing, certainly not for the faint of heart. (Consider yourself warned.) Yet this is an excellent addition to the serial-killer literature because of the straight-from-the-heart-of-darkness provenance of those same gruesome stories.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)