Killing for Culture: Death Film from Mondo to Snuff


David Kerekes - 1996
    Including: Feature film, Mondo film, Death film, and a comprehensive filmography and index. Illustrated by rare and stunning photographs from cinema, documentary and real life, Killing for Culture is a necessary book which examines and questions the human obsession with images of violence, dismemberment and death, and the way our society is coping with an increased profusion of these disturbing yet compelling images from all quarters.

The Myth of Helter Skelter


Susan Atkins-Whitehouse - 2012
    This is the story of Helter Skelter. After decades of receiving letters from misguided youth and misinformed fanatics, Susan Atkins hoped to produce a counter-point to the "Helter Skelter" story that would demystify the crimes and show them for what they were. She hoped if she could explain them maybe they would no longer be the point of obsession they have become to some. “People are intrigued by what they don’t understand.” Susan Atkins-Whitehouse

The Knife Went In: Real-Life Murderers and Our Culture


Theodore Dalrymple - 2017
    Since the 1990s, Theodore Dalrymple has witnessed its modern variety in real life. For over a quarter of a century he has treated and examined many more murderers than most as a prison doctor, psychiatrist, and court expert in some of Britain's most deprived areas. Here, he delves deep into his life of personal encounters with the murderous underclass to determine what has changed overtime and what has not. Inimitably, his unique portrait of modern criminals is at the same time a parable of dysfunction in our own culture. Through his experiences, he exposes today's vicious cult of denial, blaming and psychobabble that hides behind a corrosive sentiment of caring. Illustrated with scores of eye-opening, true-life vignettes, The Knife Went In is in turn hilariously funny, chillingly horrifying, and always unexpectedly revealing. Taken together, this lifetime of experience is a clear and unsentimental mirror in which we view modern progress without its varnish.

Serial Homicide Volume 1 - Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer & more


R.J. Parker - 2016
    It's believed he killed 30 plus women. Jeffrey Dahmer (the Milwaukee Monster), was a rapist, killer, necrophiliac, and cannibal who killed 17 young boys and men between 1978 and 1991. Albert Fish was a child rapist, cannibal and serial killer who operated between 1924 and 1932. It's believed that he killed at least 9 children and possibly more. During the 1980s and ‘90s, Gary Ridgway (Green River Killer), a serial killer and necrophiliac, is believed to have killed 49 women, but confessed to murdering 71. Between 1978 and 1983 in the United Kingdom, Dennis Nilsen (The Kindly Killer) is known to have killed between 12 and 15 young men. He had a ritual of bathing and dressing the corpses, preserving them for a time before dissecting and disposing of his victims by either burning them in a fire or flushing their parts down a toilet. Known as the Co-Ed Butcher, Edmund Kemper was a cannibal, necrophiliac and serial killer who, between 1964 and 1973, killed 10 women including his mother who he beheaded, used her head as a dartboard and for oral sex. Plus... Bonus Story In February 2013, LAPD Cop Chris Dorner went on a shooting revenge/spree killing targeting higher-up officers and their families.

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination


Sheera Frenkel - 2021
     Once one of Silicon Valley’s greatest success stories, Facebook has been under constant fire for the past five years, roiled by controversies and crises. It turns out that while the tech giant was connecting the world, they were also mishandling users’ data, spreading fake news, and amplifying dangerous, polarizing hate speech. The company, many said, had simply lost its way. But the truth is far more complex. Leadership decisions enabled, and then attempted to deflect attention from, the crises. Time after time, Facebook’s engineers were instructed to create tools that encouraged people to spend as much time on the platform as possible, even as those same tools boosted inflammatory rhetoric, conspiracy theories, and partisan filter bubbles. And while consumers and lawmakers focused their outrage on privacy breaches and misinformation, Facebook solidified its role as the world’s most voracious data-mining machine, posting record profits, and shoring up its dominance via aggressive lobbying efforts. Drawing on their unrivaled sources, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang take readers inside the complex court politics, alliances and rivalries within the company to shine a light on the fatal cracks in the architecture of the tech behemoth. Their explosive, exclusive reporting led them to a shocking conclusion: The missteps of the last five years were not an anomaly but an inevitability—this is how Facebook was built to perform. In a period of great upheaval, growth has remained the one constant under the leadership of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg. Both have been held up as archetypes of uniquely 21st century executives—he the tech “boy genius” turned billionaire, she the ultimate woman in business, an inspiration to millions through her books and speeches. But sealed off in tight circles of advisers and hobbled by their own ambition and hubris, each has stood by as their technology is coopted by hate-mongers, criminals and corrupt political regimes across the globe, with devastating consequences. In An Ugly Truth, they are at last held accountable.

The Thomas Ligotti Reader


Darrell Schweitzer - 2003
    In following years there has been a great deal of interest in the author and his works, although, until now, articles about him have mostly been scattered in obscure journals. Now, at last, here is a book about him, a symposium of explorations and examinations of the Ligottian universe by such leading critics as S.T. Joshi, Stefan Dzimianowicz, Robert M. Price. With a complete, up-to-date bibliography of Ligotti's work, two interviews with him, and even a fascinating essay by Ligotti himself.

The Curse of Brink's-Mat: Twenty-Five Years of Murder and Mayhem - The Inside Story of the 20th Century's Most Lucrative Armed Robbery


Wensley Clarkson - 2012
    The Curse of Brink's-Mat reveals the pulse-racing full story of the crime itself before moving to its chilling aftermath, which still reverberates to this day. The heist made the careers of many of the underworld's biggest names, and changed the face of British crime forever but in the years that followed the robbery, many of those involved, innocent and guilty alike have been sent to an early grave. Two decades on, the death toll is still rising. Nobody knows more about that extraordinary morning's events than Wensley Clarkson. Nobody is better placed to track the vicious, violent and unexpected waves that followed in its wake or bring to life its cast of larger-than-life characters. From small-time crime in south-east London, to ‘the heist of the century' and its bloody consequences, Wensley Clarkson's The Curse of Brink's-Mat is an epic tale of villainy, gold and revenge.

One Pitch Away: The Players' Stories of the 1986 League Championships and World Series


Mike Sowell - 1995
    An inside-the-dugout account, based on interviews with the key players among the Angels, Astros, Mets and Red Sox, of a remarkable season and arguably the most spectacular comeback in the history of the sport.

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right


Angela Nagle - 2017
    On one side the alt right ranges from the once obscure neo-reactionary and white separatist movements, to geeky subcultures like 4chan, to more mainstream manifestations such as the Trump-supporting gay libertarian Milo Yiannopolous. On the other side, a culture of struggle sessions and virtue signalling lurks behind a therapeutic language of trigger warnings and safe spaces. The feminist side of the online culture wars has its equally geeky subcultures right through to its mainstream expression. Kill All Normies explores some of the cultural genealogies and past parallels of these styles and subcultures, drawing from transgressive styles of 60s libertinism and conservative movements, to make the case for a rejection of the perpetual cultural turn.

Casablanca Companion: The Movie Classic and Its Place in History


Richard E. Osborne - 1997
    Whether you've watched "Casablanca" countless times or you're going to see it for the first time, "The Casablanca Companion" will both deepen your understanding and heighten your enjoyment.

The Sinking of the Bounty: The True Story of a Tragic Shipwreck and its Aftermath


Matthew Shaer - 2013
    It looked like something out of a movie--and, in a way, it was. The ship was the Bounty, a replica of a British merchant vessel of the same name whose crew famously mutinied in 1789. She had been built for a Marlon Brando film in the 1960s--and now she was sinking, her sixteen-person crew fleeing into the sea amid the splintered wood and torn canvas. Was the Bounty's sinking--which left her captain missing and one of her crew members dead--an unavoidable tragedy? Or was it the fault of a captain who was willing to risk everything to save the ship he loved? Drawing on exclusive interviews with Bounty survivors and Coast Guard rescuers, journalist Matthew Shaer reconstructs the ship's final voyage and the Coast Guard investigation into her sinking that followed, uncovering a riveting story of heroism and hubris in the eye of a hurricane. Praise for The Sinking of the Bounty:"Matthew Shaer masterfully recreates the last voyage and final doom of the Bounty, an iconic ship that collided with an historic storm off the Carolina coast. Shaer pulls you off the page and onto the Bounty itself--and then into the roiling sea--to relive a long night of terror, heroism and desperate quests for survival. The Sinking of the Bounty is a classic of the genre, beautifully told and riveting to read."—Sean Flynn, GQ correspondent and author of 3000 Degrees: The True Story of a Deadly Fire and the Men Who Fought It"Few images of Hurricane Sandy's destruction were as indelible, or as surreal, as the shattered wreck of the Bounty sinking beneath the waves of the 'Graveyard of the Atlantic.' Matthew Shaer's The Sinking of the Bounty is a powerful and riveting account of the disaster: the fateful decision to set sail before the storm, the crew's epic struggle to save the ship and then themselves, and the heroic rescue launched by the Coast Guard in the middle of the largest storm the Atlantic has ever seen. In the tradition of Sebastian Junger's The Perfect Storm, this is fast-paced and deeply reported storytelling."—Matthew Power, contributing editor, Harper's

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema


Anne Helen Petersen - 2014
    And the stars of yesteryear? They weren’t always the saints that we make them out to be. BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen, author of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, is here to set the record straight. Pulling little-known gems from the archives of film history, Petersen reveals eyebrow-raising information, including:*The smear campaign against the original It Girl, Clara Bow, started by her best friend *The heartbreaking story of Montgomery Clift’s rapid rise to fame, the car accident that destroyed his face, and the “long suicide” that followed *Fatty Arbuckle’s descent from Hollywood royalty, fueled by allegations of a boozy orgy turned violent assault *Why Mae West was arrested and jailed for “indecency charges” *And much more Part biography, part cultural history, these stories cover the stuff that films are made of: love, sex, drugs, illegitimate children, illicit affairs, and botched cover-ups. But it’s not all just tawdry gossip in the pages of this book. The stories are all contextualized within the boundaries of film, cultural, political, and gender history, making for a read that will inform as it entertains. Based on Petersen’s beloved column on the Hairpin, but featuring 100% new content, Scandals of Classic Hollywood is sensationalism made smart.

A City Owned


O.J. Modjeska - 2018
     Police begin to suspect that their target is a rogue operator who has emerged from their own ranks. And then, all hell breaks loose in Los Angeles… An arrest in the strangling murders of two co-eds across state lines finally leads to a break in the case, but the mild-mannered suspect remembers nothing about the crime of which he is accused. His attorney and a team of psychiatrists are convinced this is no lust murderer, but a mentally ill man tormented by an evil alter personality, the terrifyingly malevolent sexual sadist “Steve”. But what if Steve is the final triumphant act in a psychopath’s lifelong career in deception? None are prepared for the dark journey through the mazes of the human mind it will take to unlock the door to justice. From the author of the aviation disaster ebook bestseller “Gone: Catastrophe in Paradise”, “A City Owned” is the first installment of the two-part series “Murder by Increments”, the true story of the worst case of serial sex homicide in American history.

The Co-Ed Killer: A Study of the Murders, Mutilations, and Matricide of Edmund Kemper III


Margaret Cheney - 1976
    After five years in a California hospital for sex offenders, this intelligent giant (IQ 136; height 6'9") emerged to carry out the meticulously rehearsed murders of six hitchhiking girls, culminating in the murder, mutilation - and more - of his mother and her friend. Tried and found guilty, Kemper was labeled sane so that he could be given a life sentence in a prison. Margaret Cheney tells a totally compelling story based on Kemper's enormously detailed confession and extensive interviews with scores of those involved with Kemper's gruesome career. At the same time she perceptively explores Kemper's twisted motivations and the implications of his crimes and trial in a culture that seems to actively promote the acceptance of savagery.

Hollywood's Unhappiest Endings: Legends Never Die Updated


Les Macdonald - 2013
    Hollywood has so many stories to tell and, unfortunately, so many of them do not have happy endings. From Marilyn Monroe to posthumous Oscar winner Heath Ledger, this book lays bare some of the myths and gets to the heart of some of Hollywood's Unhappiest Endings.