Deviant
DEVIANT
DON’T MISS THESE ACCLAIMED NOVELS BY HAROLD SCHECHTER
NEVERMORE
A dazzling tale featuring Edgar Allan Poe
Now available in hardcover from Pocket Books
and
OUTCRY
Inspired by “Psycho” Killer Ed Gein
LOOK FOR THESE TRUE-CRIME SHOCKERS BY “AMERICA’S PRINCIPAL
CHRONICLE OF ITS GREATEST PSYSCHOPATIC KILLERS. ”*
BESTIAL
—
Amazon.com
“
Compelling…chilling
.”
DERANGED
—
American Libraries
“Horrifying.”
DEPRAVED
—Ann Rule
“Shocking.”
and
THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA
OF SERIAL KILLERS
by Harold Schechter and David Everitt
—
The Boston Book Review
*
“The scholarship is both genuine and fascinating.”
All available from Pocket Books
AND BE SURE TO READ HAROLD SCHECHTER’S NEXT TRUE-CRIME NOVEL
FATAL
The Poisonous Life of a Female Serial Killer
Coming soon from Pocket Star Books
Praise for Harold Schechter’s
True-Crime Masterpieces
THE A TO Z ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SERIAL KILLERS
by Harold Schechter and David Everitt
—
The Boston Book Review
“The scholarship is both genuine and fascinating.”
—
Rocky Mountain News
(Denver)
“This grisly tome will tell you all you ever wanted to know (and more) about everything from ‘Axe Murderers’ to ‘Zombies,’… Schechter knows his subject matter….”
—
PI Magazine
“The ultimate reference on this fascinating phenomenon.”
DEVIANT
The Shocking True Story of Ed Gein, the Original “Psycho”
—
Milwaukee Journal
“A solidly researched, well-written account of the Gein story.”
—
Film Quarterly
“[A] grisly, wonderful book … a scrupulously researched and complexly sympathetic biography of the craziest killer in American history.”
DERANGED
The Shocking True Story of America’s Most Fiendish Killer!
—
American Libraries
“This biography of the ultimate dirty old man, Albert Fish … pedophile, sadist, coprophiliac, murderer, cannibal, and self-torturer … [is] as horrifying as any novel could be.”
—
Booklist
“Compelling … grippingly fascinating-repulsive.”
—
Philadelphia Inquirer
“Reads like fiction but it’s chillingly real…. What Albert Fish did … would chill the bones of Edgar Allan Poe.”
DEPRAVED
The Shocking True Story of America’s First Serial Killer
—Caleb Carr, bestselling author of
The Alienist
“A meticulously researched, brilliantly detailed and above all riveting account of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a nineteenth-century serial killer who embodied the ferociously dark side of America’s seemingly timeless preoccupations with ambition, money, and power. Schechter has done his usual sterling job in resurrecting this amazing tale.”
—Ann Rule
“This is
must
reading for crime buffs.
Depraved
demonstrates that sadistic psychopaths are not a modern-day phenomenon…. Gruesome, awesome, compelling reporting.”
—
The Boston Book Review
“An astonishing piece of popular history. I unhesitatingly recommend [it] … to round out your understanding of the true depth, meaning, and perversity on [this] uniquely American brand of mayhem.”
—
Flint
(MI)
Journal
“Destined to be a true-crime classic…. As chilling as The Silence of the
Lambs
and as bloodcurdling as the best Stephen King novel…. It will deprive you of sleep, and take your attention away from everything else on your schedule until you finish it.”
—
Syracuse Herald-American
“[Schechter’s] writing keeps you turning the pages….”
Critical Acclaim for Harold Schechter’s
Novel Based on the Legend of Ed Gein …
OUTCRY
Voted Best Paperback Original of 1997 by
Rocky Mountain News
—
Rocky Mountain News
(Denver)
“This is a scary book….”
—Paintedrock.com
“FOUR STARS. Harold Schechter, an internationally acclaimed expert on true-crime murders by psychopathic serial killers, changes his medium by scribing a brilliant fictional account of these monsters…. All the characters are terrifyingly real…. Serial-killer aficionados need to read this thrilling tale that makes most of the subgenre seem cartoonish in comparison.”
—
Clues
magazine
“Schechter is unsurpassed…. Terrifying…. You will feel compelled to grip this novel in your hand until you finish.”
Pocket Books by Harold Schechter
The A-Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers
(
with David Everitt
)
Bestial
Depraved
Deranged
Deviant
Outcry
Nevermore
For orders other than by individual consumers, Pocket Books grants a discount on the purchase of
10 or more
copies of single titles for special markets or premium use. For further details, please write to the Vice President of Special Markets, Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, 9th Floor, New York, NY 10020-1586.
For information on how individual consumers can place orders, please write to Mail Order Department, Simon & Schuster Inc., 100 Front Street, Riverside, NJ 08075.
DEVIANT
The Shocking
True Story of the Original
“Psycho”
Harold Schechter
Pocket Books
New York London Toronto Sydney
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 1989 by Harold Schechter
Cover art copyright © 1989 by Wide World Photos
Originally published in hardcover in 1989 by Pocket Books
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For information address Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue
of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-671-02546-5
ISBN 13: 978-0-6710-2546-5
eISBN 13: 978-1-4391-0697-6
First Pocket Books trade paperback printing October 1998
20 19 18 17 16 15 14
POCKET and colophon are registered trademarks of
Simon & Schuster Inc.
Cover design by Brigid Pearson
Cover photo courtesy of AP/Wide World Photos
Printed in the U.S.A.
Proverbs 21:16
The man that wandereth out of the
way of understanding
Shall remain in the congregation of
the dead.
A NOTE ON PRONUNCIATION
ALTHOUGH THE SPELLING OF
Gein
would lead one to believe that the name rhymes with
fine
, it is actually pronounced with a long
e
, as in
fiend
.
P
ROLOGUE
I
n 1960, a maniac dressed in the clothes of his long-dead mother took a kitchen knife to a beauty in a bathtub and permanently altered the face of American horror. The murder occurred, of course, in Alfred Hitchcock’s
Psycho
, a movie that not only changed the way an entire generation of filmgoers felt about being alone in the shower but also gave birth to a new kind of cinematic bogeyman.
Psycho’s
monster was not a Transylvanian vampire or a slithery, tentacled creature from outer space but a shy, stammering bachelor with a boyish grin, a bland personality, and the utterly colorless name of Norman Bates.
Although Norman never married, he has, during the past two decades, produced a multitude of offspring—an entire race of cinematic psychos who, following in his footsteps, have stalked and slaughtered countless young victims in movies with titles like
Bloodthirsty Butchers, Meatcleaver Massacre
, and
Driller Killer
. For all their extravagant goriness, however, few, if any, of these films can begin to match the supremely nightmarish power of
Psycho
.
To a great extent, that power derives from Hitchcock’s diabolical ability to undermine our faith in the essential stability of our world. Like Norman’s first victim, Marion Crane, we are propelled on a trip down a very slippery road, one that carries us inexorably away from the familiar sights and signposts of the everyday world into a terrifying irrational night realm. Before we know it, we have come upon a place where the most ordinary situations and settings are suddenly transformed into the stuff of our deepest fears—where, in a single awful instant, a motel bathroom becomes a chamber of horrors; where an affable, perfectly harmless-looking fellow metamorphoses into a crazed, knife-wielding transvestite; and where a helpless old lady turns out to be a leering corpse, decked out in a knitted shawl and grizzled wig. By the time the trip is over, we step away from the screen with the gratitude of a dreamer just awakened from a particularly harrowing nightmare, thankful that the ordeal we have just lived through was only a fiction and persuaded that nothing in the real world could ever be as horrific as such a fantasy.
Of all the shocks associated with Psycho, than, perhaps the greatest shock is this:
It is based on the truth. There really was a Norman Bates.
His name wasn’t Norman, and he didn’t run a motel. But on an isolated farmstead in the heartland of America, during the bland, balmy days of the Eisenhower era, there lived a quiet and reclusive bachelor with a lopsided grin and a diffident manner. During the day, his neighbors knew him as a slightly strange but accommodating man, the kind who could always be counted on to help with the threshing or lend a hand with a chore. It never occurred to any of them that his life was dominated by the overpowering presence of his dead mother or that his nights were spent performing the darkest and most appalling rituals. A robber of graves, a butcher of women’s bodies, a transvestite who dressed himself not in the clothes but in the very skin of his victims, he pursued his unspeakable deeds for years without detection. And when his atrocities were finally brought to light, they set off a spasm of national revulsion whose aftereffects are still felt today. They also inspired a writer named Robert Bloch to use them as the basis of a novel called Psycho, which, one year later, Alfred Hitchcock turned into the most frightening movie ever made. But compared to what really happened in Wisconsin thirty-odd years ago,
Psycho
is as reassuring as a fairy tale.