Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer [Paperback]

Harold Schechter (Author)

Book Description

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 fourteen-year-old Jesse Pomeroy was arrested in 1874, a nightmarish reign of terror over an unsuspecting city came to an end. "The Boston Boy Fiend" was imprisoned at last. But the complex questions sparked by his ghastly crime spree -- the hows and whys of vicious juvenile crime -- were as relevant in the so-called Age of Innocence as they are today.

Jesse Pomeroy was outwardly repellent in appearance, with a gruesome "dead" eye; inside, he was deformed beyond imagining. A sexual sadist of disturbing precocity, he satisfied his atrocious appetites by abducting and torturing his child victims. But soon, the teenager's bloodlust gave way to another obsession: murder.

Harold Schechter, whose true-crime masterpieces are "well-documented nightmares for anyone who dares to look" (Peoria Journal Star), brings his acclaimed mix of page-turning storytelling, brilliant insight, and fascinating historical documentation to Fiend -- an unforgettable account from the annals of American crime.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

You've probably never heard of Jesse Pomeroy unless you've read Caleb Carr's 1994 novel, The Alienist, which features a brief prison interview with "America's most famous lifer." But this legendary bogeyman will be hard to forget after you read his life story. Pomeroy tortured and murdered children in Boston in the 1870s. He was himself a child at the time, only 14 when he was finally arrested. Author Harold Schechter, a New York literature professor who has made a name for himself documenting nonfiction accounts of heinous crimes, deftly resurrects the past from newspaper accounts, letters, and other historical documents, including a reform school's massive volume disturbingly titled History of Boys. Schechter doesn't take the easy way out. He could have just pieced together reports and accounts, letting the record stiffly tell the tale. Instead, he blends his research into a seamless story, fascinating in its horror, as well as its ability to turn the century-old characters into real people. The reader will be pleased to find copies of engravings, photos, and sketches of Pomeroy, from his heyday as "boy-fiend," as well as his later days behind bars, when fellow inmates changed his nickname to a less-sinister "Grandpa." Schechter sets out to teach a lesson, and in Fiend he succeeds at reminding us that modern times don't have a monopoly on juvenile terror. --Jodi Mailander Farrell

From Publishers Weekly

From serial killer expert Schechter comes a grisly, hopped-up, but surprisingly well-executed narrative of the vicious crimes and long imprisonment of Jesse Pomeroy, the notorious 19th-century "Boston Boy Fiend." Schechter argues that "killer kids have always been with us," but even in the context of a history of horrifying examples of youth violence, the case of Pomeroy is appalling. An abused, deformed, impoverished child, he graduated at age 12 from animal cruelty to the ritualized torture and mutilation of younger boys. In 1872 he was caught and sentenced to six years in a reformatory. He presented a rehabilitated facade and, following his shrewish but loyal mother's campaigning, was released after 16 months. Six weeks later he killed a neighborhood girl; an indifferent constabulary failed to discover her body until after Pomeroy was apprehended for a second vicious child-murder. This confluence caused unprecedented outrage; ultimately, Pomeroy received a life sentence in solitary confinement. While Schechter has displayed a career enthusiasm for what Hannibal Lecter termed "louche" subject matter (Schechter's books on serial murderers have been titled Bestial, Depraved, Deranged, etc.), he is a deft writer and does well at re-creating from documentation the thoughts and perspectives of long-dead figures; even Pomeroy is rendered subtly, with creepy verisimilitude. Schechter ably portrays the "living death" of Pomeroy's captivity (he served 53 years, making repeated escape attempts, and had become a media curiosity by the 1920s), and captures the poignancy of the infirm Pomeroy's release, in 1929, to a prison farm, where he remained until his death in 1932. This is a memorably gothic tale of sadistic psychosis and social vengeanceAtrue-crime lovers will not want to miss it.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Gallery Books; Original edition (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067101448X
• ISBN-13: 978-0671014483
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (30 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #131,842 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #42 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Regional U.S. > New England

More 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.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

36 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Yet another true crime masterpiece!, October 25, 2000

By 

Thomas A. Morrow (Oak Ridge, TN United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer (Paperback)

Harold Schechter is among my favorite True Crime authors because he brings a much-needed historical perspective to violent crime. Unlike other writers in this genre, Schechter mainly follows psychopaths and serial killers at the turn of the century. And if you thought contemporary America bred the worst violent criminals, Schechter will quickly remind you that our past was always worse than our present.

"Fiend" tells the story of Jesse Pomeroy, a boy who began to abduct and sexually torture small children in South Boston when he was only twelve, and eventually murdered his victims when he turned fourteen. And Pomeroy's crime wave started in 1871, shortly after the Civil War ended.

After Pomeroy's arrest, newspaper editorials of that period quickly declared that America was in the midst of a violent "crime epidemic" that threatened to tear down the whole country -- just as they do today after every school shooting.

And like today, critics blamed Pomeroy's behavior on violent entertainment. Today's scapegoats are horror films and video games. In Pomeroy's day, sociologists blamed dime novels about "Wild Bill Hickock" and "Indian Dan."

And like today, outraged Americans struggled over how to appropriately penalize juvenile offenders. While many demanded that Pomeroy be executed to serve as a deterrent, others pleaded with the Massachusetts governor NOT to hang a 14-year-old boy. (Pomeroy was eventually sentenced to life in prison in an unusually cruel manner.)

Like all of Schechter's previous works, "Fiend" is a very well researched, very disturbing book that zips along at a breathless pace. But it's still not as gruesome as Schechter's biography of Albert Fish, the elderly cannibal who stalked New York's children during the 1920s. "Deranged" recounts a psychosexual pathology so bizarre and unbelievable, Albert Fish made Jeffrey Dahmer appear sane by comparison.

27 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another Great One from Harold Schechter, January 9, 2001

By 

K. L. Uminski "Tiny Bubbles" (Arlington, MA USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer (Paperback)

I'm from the Boston area, and while my whole family is in Chelsea (the site of much of the action) I had only heard about Jesse Pomeroy while reading The Alienist by Caleb Carr. I was quite excited to find out about Schechter's new book (thanks Amazon!). I actually became interested in true crime after the Columbine shootings, and have been reading about children who kill. From Mary Bell to the Liverpool boys who killed a toddler, to the Florida kids who killed the local bully, this subject has been endlessly facinating to me. Ok, so maybe it is a bit gruesome too. But I will say that with this book, Schechter hits the nail on the head. Children who kill other children have been with us for a long time, and we continue to give the same lame excuses: the media (for Jesse that was dime novels, for our recent murders its the movies and video games that are blamed), single mothers, and just plain evil.

This book does not answer the question of why, but we get a glimpse into the mind of one of these child killers. It is quite chilling. Schechter's research is awesome and his writing style is engaging and his message is clear (and frightening) the next fiend could be living next door, playing in the sandbox!

If this book and subject matter are of interest to you, I also highly recommend Cries Unheard: Why Children Kill; The Story of Mary Bell.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last, a definitive account of this little-known monster., October 25, 2000

By 

Eric Oppen (Iowa Falls, IA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Fiend: The Shocking True Story Of Americas Youngest Serial Killer (Paperback)

To most people, the name Jesse Harding Pomeroy means nothing. But to the people of Massachussetts from the mid-1870s to the mid-1920s, and even beyond, it was the name of a monster. Jesse Pomeroy was one of the youngest people ever sentenced to death, and when his sentence was commuted, it was to solitary confinement for over forty years. His record of time in solitary is only equalled by the Birdman of Alcatraz. Still, when one considers the appalling cruelty and sadism of his crimes, including two particularly shocking murders of young children, it's very difficult to feel sorry for him. Pomeroy made a cameo appearance in Caleb Carr's _The Alienist,_ but Carr changed a few facts---for starters, Pomeroy was never, ever in Sing Sing, but served his sentence mostly at Charlestown Prison in Greater Boston. At a time when many people sigh for an imaginary lost Utopia in the past, when all children were good, it's salutary to see that so little has changed. Were Pomeroy to appear today and be caught, the terms of the controversies that would swirl around his head would hardly differ from those that actually did, back in the days of President Ulysses S. Grant. Serial killers, even child serial killers, are, unfortunately, nothing new, and neither are the scapegoats blamed, such as lurid popular entertainment. I have to say that if Pomeroy had been hanged, even at fourteen, the world would have been a bit better, cleaner place. Even hardened bleeding-hearts would have difficulty sympathizing with him much.