Harold Schechter is a true-crime writer who specializes in serial killers. He attended the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he obtained a Ph.D. He is professor of American literature and popular culture at Queens College of the City University of New York.
When he speaks on television, he inflects the ends of all his sentences to sound like questions.
Fatal : The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer, the story of 19th century murderess Jane Toppan
A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (co-written with David Everitt)
The Serial Killer Files : The Who, What, Where, How, and Why of the World's Most Terrifying Murderers
Panzram: A Journal of Murder
World's Most Terrifying Murderers
Dr. H. H. Holmes was the alias of Herman Webster Mudgett (1861 - May 7, 1896). ... Albert Fish around the time of his last arrest Albert H. Fish (May 19, 1870 – January 16, 1936) was an American serial killer and cannibal. ... Jesse Harding Pomeroy (November 29, 1859–September 29, 1932) was the youngest person convicted of the crime of murder in the first degree in the history of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. ... Edward Theodore Gein (1906-1984) Edward Theodore Gein (August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), was one of the most notorious murderers in United States history. ... Psycho is a 1959 suspense novel by Robert Bloch, which describes the events surrounding the encounter of an embezzler and the profoundly disturbed motel proprietor Norman Bates. ... Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation is a 1994 sequel to the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) horror film. ... Jane Toppan (1854 - 1938), born Nora Kelly, has sometimes been called the female Jack the Ripper. ...
Mystery
Nevermore - Edgar Allan Poe joins Davy Crockett to solve a series of shocking murders in Baltimore in 1835.
The Hum Bug - Poe teams with Showman PT Barnum to solve a series of murders in New York.
Mask of the Red Death - Poe joins forces with Kit Carson to track down a liver-eating murderer. Like the previous book, this one also takes place in New York.
The Tell-Tale Corpse - Poe groups with author Louisa May Alcott to put down yet another murderer. This time, he takes his mystery to Massachusetts.
Outcry
Popular culture
The Manly Movie Guide
Savage Pastimes: A Cultural History of Violent Entertainment
Real to Reel
Patterns in Popular Culture: A SourceBook for Writers
Schechter reveals his own passions with an account of the Davy Crockett craze of 1954-55, created by a Disney series he describes as stunning in its "sheer brutality" and its "shootings, stabbings, scalpings, stranglings." It was regarded as "wholesome family entertainment" back in the day.
Schechter tags the critics of media violence as a group of "hysterical" know-nothings with an "almost willful blindness." This is where his book falls short.
Schechter continually invokes the critics of violent media as if they were a creepy phantasm of the Gothic novels he describes, but never cites them or systematically addresses their arguments.
There is little in Dr. HaroldSchechter's demeanor to suggest someone immersed in the subjects of murder and gore, but his office decorations -- which include several skeletons, a small corpse on a stretcher, a rubber version of a dismembered foot and his complete collection of serial killer trading cards -- might provide a hint.
Schechter, a soft-spoken literature professor and author who lives with his wife and two daughters on a quiet street here, is considered an expert on crime.
Schechter said that the crowds that went to see ''The Silence of the Lambs,'' a movie about a cannibalistic killer, were generally law-abiding people who would never act out their violent impulses but were instead able to ventilate taboo feelings toward violence and sex by watching the movie.
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