Serial Killers: Up Close and Personal: Inside the World of Torturers, Psychopaths, and Mass Murderers

Serial Killers: Up Close and Personal is an amazing book. I didn't pick this book up expecting anything, so wasn't let down (as the other reviewers obviously were). This book tells about the lives of 11 serial killers. It's not very well written in parts, but the story is completely compelling, and it's hard to put down. It is extremely gory and terrifying in its descriptions, and it's about real life monsters. Some of the serial killers I had heard of before, including Aileen Carol Wournos, and John Wayne Gacy. One of the chapters describes the Amityville Horror. I hadn't realized that the movie was based on real events. But the real story is even more bizarre (and has nothing to do with spirits, but might have had a lot to do with the mob). The book gets into the back story of the crimes. It does have a lot of interviews, some with the criminals and many with people who were in their lives before and after the crimes. I don't think it's an issue that there aren't long paragraphs where the criminal talks about what happened, because often times the author states that what he was told was lies or changed completely several times in the telling. In short, this is a fascinating book.