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The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Colin Wilson (Introduction), Peter Sotos (Afterword), Alan Keightley (Foreword) "If we are to have a serious discourse on murder and some of its practitioners, we should first broadly define our terms..." (more)
Key Phrases: Green River, Los Angeles, Mad Butcher (more...)

3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The infamous "Moors Murderer," writing from his U.K. jail cell, Brady provides a rambling account of the socio-philosophical and psychological genesis of the modern day serial killer, but it's emphatically "not an apologia." The child pornographer and convicted killer (of 10-year-old Lesley Ann Downey, 12-year-old John Kilbride and others) spends the first half of the book contending that killers such as himself, who are free from societal, religious and moral chains, are able to provide greater insight into the criminal mind than psychiatrists, crime reporters or police. But this argument, in and of itself, is unsurprising, and any logical authority Brady might have been able to build up is undermined by page after page of his nihilistic ranting. Pointing to myriad problems present in overpopulated, self-satisfied, privileged societies, Brady imagines contemporary culture as a breeding ground for serial killers. To prove his point, he attempts psychological profiles of Henry Lee Lucas, John Wayne Gacy, Ted Bundy and other notorious killers. But these chapters are not profiles so much as they are detailed accounts of the gruesome crimes committed. While revisiting such felonies might be enjoyable for the hardcore true crime fan, for most readers the depictions will feel as gratuitous as the heinous crimes they describe. The relentlessly abrasive and controversial social critic Sotos (Pure), an aficionado of murders recorded on audio tape, adds a provocative afterword.

From Booklist

Admit it: you don't know nearly enough about Britain's lurid child-sex killings, the moors murders, or about the minds of serial killers like their perpetrator, Brady. The slayer himself probes the mindset of the serial killer--"a person who kills spasmodically over a comparatively lengthy period of time" rather than in the rampage characteristic of the mass murderer--for some 100 pages, then considers individually such exemplars of the type as Henry Lee Lucas, Ted Bundy, and John Wayne Gacy with the insight of a peer. A quiet, bookish lad, Brady waxed antisocial in his teens, as Colin Wilson explains in a lengthy biographical introduction. Brady's conception of moral relativism owes much to the theory of the superman Raskolnikov espoused in Crime and Punishment (Dostoyevsky is one of Brady's enthusiasms). Unbound by petty and arbitrary moral strictures, Brady sees personal choices as equivalent in worth, whether of regular or extra crispy, or of murder or rape. A significant addition to true crime literature, Brady's deposition has creepy entertainment value in spades. Mike Tribby
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

Hardcover: 311 pages
Publisher: Feral House (October 10, 2001)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0922915733
ISBN-13: 978-0922915736
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (20 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #632,832 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Inside This Book (learn more)

First Sentence:
If we are to have a serious discourse on murder and some of its practitioners, we should first broadly define our terms. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Green River, Los Angeles, Mad Butcher, Kingsbury Run, Task Force, Hillside Strangler, Timothy Kerley, Angelo Buono, Kenneth Bianchi, Graham Young, Carl Panzram, Henry Lesser, Rhonda Williams, Jack the Ripper, Lauren Wagner, Wendy Coffield, Behavioral Science Unit, King County Police, Dean Corll, Debra Lynn Bonner, Henry Lee Lucas, Veronica Lynn Compton, Richard the Third, Amina Agisheff, Attorney General

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 38 books:

Paradise Lost (Penguin Classics) by John Milton on page 28, and page 34
Myra Hindley: Inside the Mind of a Murderess by Jean Ritchie in Front Matter, and Back Matter
Also Sprach Zarathustra (German Edition) by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche on page 116, and page 217
Little Dorrit (Penguin Classics) by Charles Dickens on page 145
The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells on page 106

See all 38 books this book cites

9 books cite this book:

Serial Killers: The Method and Madness of Monsters by Peter Vronsky in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
Media and Violence: Gendering the Debates by Karen Boyle in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
A Question of Blood: An Inspector Rebus Novel by Ian Rankin on page 183
Couples Who Kill by Carol Anne Davis on page 184
The Human Predator: A Historical Chronicle of Serial Murder and Forensic Investigation by Katherine Ramsland on page 167

See all 9 books citing this book

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	6% buy Selfish, Little: The Annotated Lesley Ann Downey 5.0 out of 5 stars (1) $15.00
	6% buy Final Truth : The Autobiography of a Serial Killer 4.4 out of 5 stars (53)

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Customer Reviews

20 Reviews

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3.6 out of 5 stars (20 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Cut and paste, July 9, 2008

By	B. Hastie "Delivery boy" (Melbourne, Victoria Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Brady, a man of some intelligence, struggles with the written word. Like many an undereducated suburban letter-to-the-editor writer he tries to lift the tone by using long words where short would do. A fair proportion of the book is more or less lifted from other sources. Many of the crimes analysed start with fairly ludicrous descriptive passages dealing with the weather or the traffic, typical of lower end true crime writing. Given Brady was unable to do any field research you might assume that is what they are. Other more technical passages are lifted from such sources as Robert Hare's "Without conscience".

Brady could be accurately described as Sadean in that his crimes mirrored the fantasies you find in "120 days of Sodom", "Juliette" and other sources. On the other hand Nietzsche seems little more than a catch phrase to him. Old Friedrich would probably have found Brady's attacks on children more unter than uber.

Brady possesses little insight into his own psychological state and the resentments that drove him but does sometimes reveal himself obliquely. His analyses of the crimes of others are facile and occasionally random. All this is what we expect from a psychopath.

The book tries and fails to alter our impression of Brady, a small man who tortured and killed the weak.

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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars PRETENTIOUS AND LAUGHABLE, December 8, 2008

By	Charles Blaine Fielding (SEATTLE, WA. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Remember if you read this book that there is no Evil more depraved than to molest and kill children. And that is Ian Brady's only claim to recognition.

Brady obessionally praises the evil-doer as a heroic figure. Yet no where does he discuss or even allude to his own torturing, sexual molestation and murder of five helpless children. A strange omission indeed. Instead this accomplished child abuser treats, and largely bores, the reader with lies about his fanciful criminal career, incessant displays of his grandoise and fragile ego, inferior re-hashes of other serial killers and verbose psuedo-philosophizing. All mixed with ample doses of whining self-pity about the way he has been treated.

Remember too that Ian Brady is a consummate and complusive liar. He inadvertently reveals his lies {at page 284} when he points out that many prisoners escape into fantasy and come to half believe their "fictitious past". So take anything he says with more than a grain of salt.

The first half of "Gates" is taken up with Brady's sociopathic rantings. He hates everyone indiscriminately- except for himself. His monotonous diatribes are interpersed with idle threats about how the criminal classes are going to rise up and kill all the rest of us. In actuality, criminals despise child killers like Brady who they call "baby rapers" and attack whenever they are given the opportunity. Brady has had to be protected for his entire prison stay from his fellow prisoners. These comical rantings are more evidence of Brady's disconnect from the real world.

Brady's current populist pose is ridiculous. He was an avowed neo-Nazi who held the" masses" in contempt and himself above the law. And his child victims were hardly oppressors of the poor and down-trodden. Indeed they came from the same lower class working background as Brady himself. Brady never lifted a finger in his life against the upper-classes.

One of Brady's "heroes" is Richard Ramirez, the Los Angeles "Night Salker" of the mid-1980s. Brady paints him as a fellow revolutionary who attacked and killed members of the WASP establishment. He did no such thing. Instead Ramirez attacked tiny Asian- American women because they were easy to subdue,like the wimp Brady who only attacked children. And Ramirez was finally captured by a crowd of his fellow Hispanics who were as appalled as everyone else by his butchery.

Another fantasy of Brady was that he killed after applying "auto-hypnosis" to himself. He never explains what this is. But what he really did was to idrink massive doses of alcohol. He was a heavy drinker and incipient alcoholic. Like Ted Bundy, he used alcohol to dull his senses and self- control. Colin Wilson, in his introduction to the book, makes a fundamental error in glorifying Brady as a man seeking super- normal experiences. But the opposite is true. Brady was incapable of any kind of exalted experience. His personal life was one of unremitting banality.

Brady incessantly lies too in portraying himself as a master criminal. He asserts he travelled about England committing unspecified crimes with a band of disciples. No such incidents occurred. He committed only his child killings and only in and around Manchester. His "disciples were only Myra Hindley and the dullish 17- year old Daivd Smith. And it was Smith who turned him into the police.

Like other serial killers, Brady was a weakling and coward who attacked by ambush only the weakest prey he could find. In the face of authority he became meek and compliant. And when the end came he meekly surrendered to an unarmed policeman disguised as a baker.

Only at the typewriter does he now construct a fictional larger-than- life portrait of himself. Then he asserts he killed disloyal disciples. Another lie, the result of wishful thinking. His follie-a- deux with Myra Hindley ended in prison when she opportunistically turned against him to tried to get released through her champion the deranged "Lord" Longford.

In compensation for all Brady's b.s., there is his laughable bad writing. One example is his fantasy of master criminal "whilst in pursuit of multifarious criminal activities in many cities". {page 217}. Such "multifarious criminal activies" never occurred. Brady's criminal career consisted of petty crimes for which he had a genius for being caught.

There is one key insight in the book. Brady admitts that his child-killing episodes were less than satisfactory. He realizes much too late- for Lesley Ann and his four other victims-the superiority of Fantasy over deed. Brady writes here in a rare authentic moment. He notes that killing itself is secondary. The real goal is to gain control over the victim. But the mundane requirements of this obviate the "pleasure". He cannot enjoy the tormenting, torturing and sexually abusing the victim because the practical considerations interfere. Hence he argues for the pure pleasures of fantasy. Too bad five children had to go through such torment for him to learn this lesson. But the children were killed primarily to destroy the evidence.
See page 39.

Conclusion:

Given the propensity of novelists and movie- makers to concoct serial killers as brilliant, bigger-than-life monsters- a la Hannibal Lector and "American Psyche"- Brady's book is a needed corrective. Behind his mask of "Janus" he is a pathetic loser, a tawdry little man.

Despite these criticisms, Brady's turgid exercise in self- justification is worth reading. He is the only child serial killer ever to try to justify himself in print. But it is the lies and fantasies that impress the discerning reader. It is Brady's own badly damaged ego that is most on display here.And his appallingly bad writing do provide some black comedic moments

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4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars insightful, but damaged, May 12, 2007

By	C. Williams (Fayetteville, Arkansas United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Ian Brady's work is interesting, insightful, and generally well-written, though his penchant for 50-cent words gets a little tiresome. He is VERY full of himself (one of the defining points of serial killers, it would seem), and I think that his arguments would probably look better to the casual reader if he weren't so constant in his railing against authority. Instead of coming across as well-reasoned, as he honestly does most of the time, during these episodes he just appears childish and whiney. I think he could have gotten that particular point across--that evangelical Christians, politicians, and corporate CEOs are often far more dangerous and destructive in their repression and extremes of moral/ethical hypocrisy than the working-class criminal--without the constant railing against "The Man." Of course, I was able to remain patient with it, primarily because I understand that he hand-wrote the whole book, as do many who write from prison. It's a ton of pressure, knowing that you can't just hit the "backspace" key and edit your words; I think that, given that kind of pressure, he did an admirable job.

That said, he makes a LOT of good points, which is something that people, like the reviewer below who apparently thinks that people who want to understand such things should kill themselves (way to go, by the way--real nice attitude there), generally don't WANT to know about someone who could commit such atrocious crimes. He is extremely intelligent, very well-read, and often very well-reasoned. More importantly, I think he generally delivered on the stated purpose of the book, which is to provide an understanding of why people like him work the way they do. To a great extent, it's a treatise in moral relativism at its best--or worst. I honestly couldn't disagree with a lot of what he had to say, much as I may have liked to. He KNOWS himself, which is sadly something that I don't believe can be said of most people. In that, kudos to him.

The afterword by Peter Sotos is another creature entirely. To get a good grip on what he's driving at, it's helpful to have read some of his other works--if you can stomach them. A great fan of child torture and rape who professes an extreme misogyny second only to the medieval Church (as seen in his interview in the "Apocalypse Culture" series, if you don't have the fortitude to read anything else), Sotos is, in his way, far scarier to me than Brady. To put it bluntly, if I had to overnight with one of them, I'd take Brady any day--a perspective, I'm sure, that would leave Sotos smiling. Yet again, Sotos seems to have an understanding of himself and his own psychology that is demonstratively lacking in the general populace, so... much as I hate to say it (especially as a woman), kudos to him.

These men are monsters, but they know it, understand it, and respect it. Can most people HONESTLY say the same?

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting, but.....
I for a brief time studied criminal psychology, and was fascinated with Brady and Hindley. I never could wrap my mind around them, as they do not fit with the typical profile of... Read more

Published 7 months ago by C. Park

5.0 out of 5 stars A must have!
I'm so glad to have this in my collection of all of the True Crime books I own!

Published 12 months ago by Jeremy Taylor

1.0 out of 5 stars I AM DISGUSTED WITH AMAZON FOR SUPPORTING THE SALE OF THIS BOOK
The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis

I bet Amazon does not have the guts to publish this. Read more

Published 24 months ago by Jean James

1.0 out of 5 stars idiots.
WTF? what kind of animal would BUY and then READ a book penned by someone who tortured, raped, and killed CHILDREN? are you all insane? Go Kill Yourselves Scum.

Published on February 28, 2007 by Reality

5.0 out of 5 stars A Great Read
Brady's "Gates of Janus" is one great read. He offers devastating social commentary, and I often found myself squirming as I turned the pages. Read more

Published on October 20, 2006 by Raj K. Dixit

2.0 out of 5 stars Mixed feelings!
After reading Emlyn Williams' book about the Moor Murders, I was hoping to get a better understanding from Ian Brady, the convicted murderer himself. Read more

Published on August 25, 2006 by Sylviastel

4.0 out of 5 stars STRANGE BUT INTRESTING

This book is worth reading even if you HATE brady.

after nearly 40 years in the british system, brady comes across as a depressed suicidal intelligent man... Read more

Published on May 25, 2006 by A. Girvan

1.0 out of 5 stars bad catholics
It was recomended that I read this book or I wpuld never have bothered. I find the other reviews of this book just as revealing as any of the text in 'Gates of Janus'. Read more

Published on October 4, 2004 by Mr. D. M. Kelso-mitchell

4.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly well-written.
Ian Brady, The Gates of Janus (Feral House, 2001)

Feral House has a history of presenting some of the best nonfiction the planet has to offer, all of it under the table (except... Read more

Published on January 14, 2004 by Robert P. Beveridge

2.0 out of 5 stars Gates of janus
A dis-jointed book. The only thing I found interesting was Ian's view on sorrow.

Published on July 7, 2002

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