True crime is crime fact that looks like crime fiction. It is one of the most popular genres of our pathological public sphere, and an integral part of our contemporary wound culture-a culture, or at least cult, of commiseration. If we cannot gather in the face of anything other than crime, violence, terror, trauma, and the wound, we can at least commiserate. That is, as novelist Chuck Palahniuk writes, we can at least "all [be] miserable together." The "murder leisure industry," its media...

Bodies and Machines is a striking and persuasive examination of the body-machine complex and its effects on the modern American cultural imagination. Bodies and Machines, first published in 1992, explores the links between techniques of representation and social and scientific technologies of power in a wide range of realist and naturalist discourses and practices. Seltzer draws on realist and naturalist writing, such as the work of Hawthorne and Henry James, and the discourses wh...

In his virtuosic new book noted cultural critic Mark Seltzer shows how suspense, as art form and form of life, depicts and shapes the social systems that organize our modern world. Modernity's predicament, Seltzer writes, is a society so hungry for reality that it cannot stop describing itself, and that makes for a world that continuously establishes itself by staging its own conditions. Employing the social theories of Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Niklas Luhmann, and Peter Sloterdijk, Se...

In this provocative cultural study, the serial killer emerges as a central figure in what Mark Seltzer calls 'America's wound culture'. From the traumas displayed by talk show guests and political candidates, to the violent entertainment of Crash or The Alienist, to the latest terrible report of mass murder, we are surrounded by the accident from which we cannot avert our eyes. Bringing depth and shadow to our collective portrait of what a serial killer must be, Mark Seltzer draws upon pop...

New York Times bestselling author Robert K. Tanenbaum tells the terrifying and gripping story of Charles Yukl, a mild-mannered piano and voice teacher that killed and abused his students.Everybody has a dream. For aspiring actress Suzanne Reynolds, her dream ended in a gruesome encounter with eccentric New York artist Charles Yukl. Fooled by his choirboy looks, Reynolds had no idea the man who taught her the piano was a woman-hating recluse who spent his d...

A robbery takes a fatal turn. The true story of the shocking Connecticut home invasion perpetrated by Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes.The affluent suburb of Cheshire, Connecticut, seemed like the perfect place for Dr. William Petit and his wife, Jennifer Hawke-Petit, to raise their two lovely daughters. Until July 23, 2007, when, according to police, two ex-cons invaded the Petit home hoping to embark on a routine robbery one that would ultimately prove deadl...

When detectives respond to a crime scene in Orlando, Florida, during the "summer of hurricanes" in 2004, they find Charlie Brandt hanging from the rafters in the garage of his niece, Michelle Jones' home. Inside the house, they find a scene of horror that reminds them of other murders. In 1978, 13-year-old Carol Lynn Sullivan's head was found inside a rusty paint can in Osteen, Florida; her body was never found. Homeless transient Sherry Perisho was murdered in 1989, after moving to Florid...

A SUCCESSFUL DOCTOR.Dr. Felix Polk was a married psychologist living in Berkeley, California. At forty years old, he had a successful practice and a towering reputation—until he began a scandalous affair with one of his patients: Susan Bolling. She was fifteen years old.A TROUBLED TEENAGE GIRL.After divorcing his first wife, Felix married Susan. Susan would later claim that her marriage was built on lies, manipulation, and psychologic...

From R. Barri Flowers, award winning criminologist and internationally bestselling author of The Sex Slave Murders, comes a riveting new true crime short, The Pickaxe Killers.Having written about hundreds of notable murders in his bestselling true crime book, Murders In The United States: Crimes, Killer and Victims of the Twentieth Century, one case that stood out to Flowers for its sheer brutality as well as shocking aftermath was that of Karla Faye Tucker and Daniel Garrett, who ...

Now updated with shocking details about the identity of Wayne Adam Ford’s first victim – revealed 25 years after her death – the brand new edition of a true crime classic from New York Times bestselling author Caitlin Rother delves into the disturbing mind and brutal crimes of the Humboldt County serial killer now on Death Row.“I hurt some people.”With these words, a tearful man hinted at a deadly crime, leading in...

Quiet pleasant communties, sparkling under the clear blue skies of Alberta, have witnessed bloody murders and violent mayhem.From a wide variety of accounts, Babara Smith has selected eight intriguing stories that will astound and amaze you.Mystery still surrounds the fate of pro golfer Frank Willey who disappeared in 1962. Two men were convicted of his murder, but his body has never been found. No suspect, however, was ever found in the case of MaryAnn Plett. The pretty, y...

Heather Barnett's mutilated body was discovered by her son and daughter on their return home from school in Bournemouth one November afternoon. The police quickly ascertained that the murder was premeditated and meticulously planned down to the last macabre detail: the killer had not left one single piece of DNA evidence -- even the bloody footprints from a distinct pair of trainers did not lead out of the house but ended in the front room, without any further trace. As a bizarre and sicke...