50 States of Murder: An Atlas of American Crime
Filled with hundreds of entries organized by location, 50 States of Murder is a lively and chilling work of storytelling and an authoritative survey…
Killer Colt: Murder, Disgrace, and the Making of an American Legend
An in-the-room account of John Colt’s scandalous nineteenth-century murder trial from “America’s principal chronicler of its greatest psychopathic…
Dr. Werthless: The Man Who Studied Murder (And Nearly Killed the Comics Industry)
From the creative team behind the award-winning “Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?” comes an examination of one of the most polarizing figures in…
Murderabilia
The false teeth of a female serial killer from 1908, the cut-and-paste confession of the Black Dahlia killer, the newly cracked cipher of the Zodiac…
Butcher’s Work
A Civil War veteran who perpetrated one of the most ghastly mass slaughters in the annals of U.S. crime. A nineteenth-century female serial killer…
Maniac
In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school—one of the most modern in the Midwest—Andrew P.…
Did You Hear What Eddie Gein Done?
One of the greats in the field of true crime literature, Harold Schechter (Deviant,The Serial Killer Files, Hell’s Princess), teams with five-time…
Ripped from the Headlines!
Bestselling true-crime master Harold Schechter explores the real-life headline-making psychos, serial murderers, thrill-hungry couples, and…
Reel Verse
EDITED BY Michael Waters and Harold Schechter
A unique Pocket Poets anthology of a hundred years of poetic tributes to the silver screen, from the…
Hell’s Princess
In the pantheon of serial killers, Belle Gunness stands alone. She was the rarest of female psychopaths, a woman who engaged in wholesale…
The Pirate
In 1860, a sloop drifted into New York Harbor. Not a soul on board—just blood from cabin to deck. Looted coins led to Bowery thug Albert Hicks, the…
Little Slaughterhouse on the Prairie
At a remote little inn not far from the Kansas homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder lived the Bender family. These pioneers welcomed unwary visitors…
The Brick Slayer
A series of brutal home invasions terrified Los Angeles in 1937. They ended in Chicago a year later with the arrest of African American teenager…
The Pied Piper
With makeup and an affected Elvis pout, Tucson’s Charlie Schmid was a crude parody of a bad-boy heartthrob. In 1964, he still had a hold on girls…
Rampage
In 1949, things like this just didn’t happen: A quiet New Jersey resident took a morning walk with a 9 mm Luger pistol. In twelve minutes he murdered…
Panic
During the Depression, economic anxieties found an outlet in a series of child murders that triggered an irrational nationwide hysteria: pedophiliac…
MAN-EATER
In the winter of 1873, a small band of prospectors lost their way in the frozen wilderness of the Colorado Rockies. Months later, when the snow…
The Mad Sculptor
Beekman Place, one of the most exclusive addresses in Manhattan, hasn’t always been home to the rich. In the 1930s, when bluebloods like the…
Masters of True Crime
Riveting stories assembled by bestselling criminologist R. Barri Flowers in an unparalleled collection of some of the top true-crime writers in the…
Psycho USA
AMERICA’S MOST COLD-BLOODED!
In the horrifying annals of American crime, the infamous names of brutal killers such as Bundy, Dahmer, Gacy, and…
Killer Verse
Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a spine-tingling collection of terrifically creepy poems about the deadly art of murder.
The villains and…
Killer Colt
With such acclaimed works as The Devil’s Gentleman, Harold Schechter has earned renown as the dean of true-crime historians. Now, in this gripping…
The Whole Death Catalog
In the tradition of Mary Roach’s bestselling Stiff and Jessica Mitford’s classic exposé The American Way of Death comes this meticulously…
Depraved
The heinous bloodlust of Dr. H.H. Holmes is notorious — but only Harold Schechter’s Depraved tells the complete story of the killer whose evil acts…
True Crime
Americans have had an uneasy fascination with crime since the earliest European settlements in the New World, and right from the start true crime…
Conversation Pieces
edited with Kurt Brown
This utterly delightful anthology gathers poetic responses to other poems in a dialogue conducted across space and time.
Here…
The Devil’s Gentleman
From renowned true-crime historian Harold Schechter comes the riveting exploration of a notorious New York City murder in the 1890s, the fascinating…
The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
(Revised and Updated Edition)
Written with David Everitt
Amazon.com Review The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers is a lighthearted but reasonably…
Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment
In SAVAGE PASTIMES: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment, Harold Schechter writes, “The current uproar over media sensationalism rests on two…
Bestial: The Savage Trail of the True American Monster
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…
The Mask of Red Death
It is the sweltering summer of 1845, and the thriving metropolis has fallen victim to a creature of the most inhuman depravity. Found days apart, two…
The Serial Killer Files
THE DEFINITIVE DOSSIER ON HISTORY’S MOST HEINOUS!
Hollywood’s make-believe maniacs like Jason, Freddy, and Hannibal Lecter can’t hold a candle to…
Fatal
In an era that produced some of the most vicious female sociopaths in American history, Jane Toppan would become the most notorious of them all.
AN…
The Hum Bug
A literary genius…his realm of terror lies in the shadows of imagination.
A brilliant killer…his violence shatters the night streets — and his…
Panzram: A Journal of Murder
Schechter contributed the Introduction to this book
A detailed memoir and self-analysis by a mass murderer. Panzram was born in 1891 on a…
Nevermore: A Novel
Praised by Caleb Carr for his “brilliantly detailed and above all riveting” true-crime writing, Harold Schechter brings his expertise to a marvelous…
Fiend
A MONSTER PREYED UPON THE CHILDREN OF NINETEENTH-CENTURY BOSTON. HIS CRIMES WERE APPALLING — AND YET HE WAS LITTLE MORE THAN A CHILD HIMSELF.
When…
Deviant
Deviant is about everyone’s favorite ghoul, Ed Gein–whose crimes inspired the writers of Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Silence of the…
The Bosom Serpent: Folklore and Popular Art
In our high-tech, consumerist culture, traditional folklore has found itself revived in an eclectic mix of popular works from B-movies, TV shows, and…
Original Sin: The Visionary Art of Joe Coleman
Schechter contributed an essay to this book:
Artist Joe Coleman’s ORIGINAL SIN contains visually stimulating and radically graphic nightmarish…
Deranged
In this book Schechter turns his keen historian’s gaze on real-life serial killer Albert Fish, who killed–and ate–as many as 15 children in New…
Outcry
Investigating a series of brutal murders, reporter Paul Novak stumbles into the legend of Ed Gein, the “butcher of Plainfield, Wisconsin,” and…
The Manly Movie Guide
Virile Video & Two-Fisted Cinema
In the search for quality entertainment, a man must be heavily armed against the snobbery and derision of a…
Discoveries: Fifty Stories of the Quest
Edited by Schecter with Jonna Gormely Semeiks
Reflecting today’s growing emphasis on multiculturalism, the second edition of this remarkably…
New Gods: Psyche and Symbol in Popular Art
Harold Schecter looks at the impossible tales and images of popular art—the space odysseys and extraterrestrial civilizations, the caped crusaders…
The Tell-Tale Corpse
The Tell-Tale Corpse begins as Poe pays a visit to his old friend P. T. Barnum, who implores the wordsmith to travel to Boston to secure for Poe’s…