Bestial: The Savage Trail of a True American Monster - Softcover

Schechter, Harold

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671732188 ISBN 13: 9780671732189

Publisher: Gallery Books, 1999

Synopsis

FROM SOCIAL OUTCAST TO NECROPHILE AND MURDERER -- HIS APPALLING CRIMES STUNNED AN ERA.
San Francisco, the 1920s. In an age when nightmares were relegated to the fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and distant tales of the Whitechapel murders, a real-life monster terrorized America. His acts of butchery have proved him one of history's fiercest madmen.
As an infant, Earle Leonard Nelson possessed the power to unsettle his elders. As a child he was unnaturally obsessed with the Bible; before he reached puberty, he had an insatiable, aberrant sex drive. By his teens, even Earle's own family had reason to fear him. But no one in the bone-chilling winter of 1926 could have predicted that his degeneracy would erupt in a sixteen-month frenzy of savage rape, barbaric murder, and unimaginable defilement -- deeds that would become the hallmarks of one of the most notorious fiends of the twentieth century, whose blood-lust would not be equaled until the likes of Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, and Jeffrey Dahmer.
Drawing on the "gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting" (Ann Rule) that is his trademark, Harold Schechter takes a dark journey into the mind of an unrepentant sadist -- and brilliantly lays bare the myth of innocence that shrouded a bygone era.

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Review

Earle Leonard Nelson may well have been America's first serial killer. In the winter of 1926, he began a string of murders that spanned the U.S. and Canada, horrifying and confounding both the public and the police. Bestial tells the story of Nelson's life--from his bizarre childhood to his ignoble end--sparing no graphic detail in the process. If there is an answer to the question of why this man murdered, it is in this book somewhere. Everything about Nelson seems bizarre, from his family to his eating habits to his religious obsessions. But strangest of all was his compulsion to kill--for no imaginable reason. He killed women of all ages, from all walks of life, seemingly with no remorse.

Bestial reads like fast-paced fiction, complete with action, plot twists, suspense, and eerie foreshadowing. The book is compelling and elegantly written, and the story provides chilling insights into the motivations of a man who killed for killing's sake. --Lisa Higgins

About the Author

Harold Schechter is a professor of American literature and culture. Renowned for his true-crime writing, he is the author of the nonfiction books Fatal, Fiend, Bestial, Deviant, Deranged, Depraved, and, with David Everitt, The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers. He is also the author of Nevermore and The Hum Bug, the acclaimed historical novels featuring Edgar Allan Poe. He lives in New York State.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0671732188
• ISBN 13: 9780671732189
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352