Book description
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.
Journal Star (Peoria, IL)
Unflinching....fascinating....macabre.
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.
