"Lustmord" is a compilation of essays, short stories, memoirs, confessions, letters, manifestoes, poetry, drawings, photographs and other works created by serial killers, mass murderers, cannibals, necrophiles, sexual sadists, psychopaths and assassins. These compelling, authentic documents are now available for the first time in one volume - an aesthetic testimony to the emotion and logic of a murderer's mind, a mind filled with terror and hatred, absurdity and horror, pathos and iniquity. Illustrated. Preface written especially for "Lustmord" by Herbert Mullin, a serial killer who murdered thirteen people in the Santa Cruz area of California between October 1972 and February 1973.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
"Even the most imaginative writers of fiction cannot equal the stark intensity and demented enthusiasm evident in the authentic writings of murderers." Thus Brian King introduces this collection of the writings and artwork of 37 men and women who expressed themselves primarily through the act of killing for pleasure (in German, Lustmord). The material includes diary entries, letters, scribbles found on walls or scraps of paper, poems, short stories, confessions, manifestoes, autobiographical statements, instructions on technique, maps, diagrams, drawings, photographs, and black-and-white photos of paintings and sculpture. John List, for example, uses words of eerie banality to explain why he killed his whole family: "I didn't want them to experience poverty." Charlie Starkweather, by contrast, conveys deep emotion: he says his heart has "a wildcatten hatred burned into it ... turning dark black with hate of rages." Lustmord is testimony to the bizarre workings of the murderous mind.
Review
"Brian King has adopted a fascinating criteria for inclusion: these are "pleasure-killers" who have sought to decipher, compliment or embellish their misdeeds with artwork or writings. . . . And while a number of these scribes can conduct - ahem - a "decent" story, many more can barely string a sentence together. Ironically, it is with the latter - in a R. D. Laing child-like innocence kind of way - that some of the choicest nuggets are to be had. . . . "Lustmord" is fuelled by obsessives who are out of control, trying desperately to grab the handrail of life before they fall off the ride. . . . a mighty hefty read that doesn't fail to deliver on a regular basis." -- Headpress (U.K.), Spring 1997
"King has gathered together a superstar roster of evil creative types . . . Contextualized here, their drawings, suicide notes, short stories, and so on, become a kind of Outsider literature, transgressive beyond A. M. Homes's wildest dreams." -- The Village Voice, April 1997
"While I'm not obsessed with serial killers and mass murderers, it's impossible not to be drawn into this immensely fascinating book. . . . This is a very disturbing book, but one that you won't be able to put down." -- Factsheet Five, September 1996
"King has gathered together a superstar roster of evil creative types . . . Contextualized here, their drawings, suicide notes, short stories, and so on, become a kind of Outsider literature, transgressive beyond A. M. Homes's wildest dreams." -- The Village Voice, April 1997
"While I'm not obsessed with serial killers and mass murderers, it's impossible not to be drawn into this immensely fascinating book. . . . This is a very disturbing book, but one that you won't be able to put down." -- Factsheet Five, September 1996
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Lustmord" says it all...truly morbid, sordid & banal...,
By Russell A. Rohde MD "Owl" (West Covina, California USA) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
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This review is from: Lustmord: The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers (Paperback)
"Lustmord" The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers" Edit. Brian King, Burbank: Bloat Publ. Co., 1996. ISBN 0-9650324-0-X PB 314 pp., is a panoply of 37 murderers (with and without accomplices) whose crimes, chronicled in alphabetical order, are substantially written in the 1st person or snared from their confessions, self portrayls, or proclammations. The text is decently acccompanied by useful bibliography.
Unlike most books on crimes and criminals, Brian King (?fittingly) chose to have the book's preface written by serial killer Herbert Mullin. "Lustmord" is Germanic and candidly translates to "pleasure killing" -- the book is replete with such accounts, often told in such minute sordid details that elements of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) appear tantamount in a number of cases. This is not a book one must read sequentially, i.e., cover-to-cover, since the organization is extrinsic, simply alphabetical. Most cases occurred after WW II, the majority were in the US, a few in the UK. In "Lustmord" the themes of gross sexual perversion and banality become entwined with a variety of schizophrenic and schizoid behaviours and oft times sheds suggestive insight into possible origins of goaded deviancy. I suggest the book be reserved for readers with at least a modest background in medicine or psychology - it is truly morbid. Alternativly, it does serve as an excellent reference source for information on the graceless and muddled deranged eccentricitiies of the "worst of the worst".
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is the Best of the Books of Serial Killer Writings,
By
This review is from: Lustmord: The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers (Paperback)
This is a very fascinating book is worth reading. The writings and artwork of some thirty-seven murderers are contained in this book including Berkowitz, DeSalvo, Fish, Glatman, Heirens, Panzram, Schaefer, Starkweather, and the Zodiac just to name some of the more familiar ones. Good way to get into the mind of a psychopath from his own point of view. The writings are presented in a fairly nonsensationalizing fashion which lets us educate ourselves without insulting the victims. Pat Brown/Director/Investigative Criminal Profiler/The Sexual Homicide Exchange, Inc.
8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The fine art of murder,
This review is from: Lustmord: The Writings and Artifacts of Murderers (Paperback)
This compilation of extracts includes the scribblings, poems, memoirs, short stories, confessions and observations of real-life "pleasure-killers" or "lustmurderers". They range from the writings of killers who are sometimes professional writers, to the barely articulate and even the semi-literate. In a way that easily surpasses the best of what "sane" literature has produced in an attempt to approximate the bestiality of crime, these documents are authentic descriptions of the violence, revenge, celebrity and anti-social dysfunction reaped by modern murderers. What makes this collection unique is that it magnifies what can be called "the fine art of murder", in delineating the "artistic" side of killing. In treating their atrocities and crimes in the spirit of literature, these killers, who comprise rapists, mutilators, cannibals and serial psychopaths, emphasise the act of murder considered for its decidedly "aesthetic" component, if one chooses to adopt this term as a synonym for the natural, the realistic, the sublime, or any term that otherwise serves to designate what moves us deeply. It can be unsettling that such confused, loveless, brutal and genuinely mad individuals can be placed in the category of "creative people", to share in the qualities that have distinguished true literary personalities: obssession, revolt, anguish, conscientiousness, paranoia, narcissim, even a sense of vision. From a clinical point of view, such literature is immensely rich and rewarding, in not only concretely illustrating various states of "pathology", but drawing to our attention a form of art that is simultaneously a weapon of psychic insurrection, or a uniquely transformative act of the criminal's stance towards society. Just as much as a deranged criminal a product of civilisation, so is he, in his efforts as an artist, also an attempt to overcome it.
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