“History is difficult to write; ‘true crime’ strays quite far from history even at its best, and so authors must settle upon and make clear what perspective they wish to explore.”

It’s always difficult to rate a work so low, and I admit this might in part be the subject matter: however, I think my rating is much more about the purpose for the story told and the execution of that purpose.

There is potentially a powerful story here for contemporary readers. Any number of angles of approaches is possible. We might have focused on the nature of small communities that fail to understand neighbors, for instance, or the challenges brought to a system of justice unequipped to diagnose the criminality in the obscene. We might have drawn parallels to arguments about the impact of environment or media upon young psyches; we might have gone fully down the hole of civilizational archetypes that we have still never processed. Each of these is given some moments here: none are the motivation, seemingly, to create this book.

Instead, we have a recounting of events with a fairly unadorned given that primarily environmental factors created a monster in rural America (a fairly reckless assumption). The novel slips quickly into some speculations about the internal fantasies Gein might have suffered, based–it seems–upon a single interview the author did. What is left, largely and unfortunately, is a graphic account more voyeuristic than enlightening, more dismissive than sociological or psychologically astute, more sketchy than history. We are supposed to be more titillated that Gein inspired popular horror tropes than what such tropes say of us, or what this work itself does.

Where it fails in what is left is the design of the work itself. Once Gein is arrested, the graphic novel becomes a long long series of unimaginative and repetitive panels of (quoted?) interviews. What surprised me is that I found these the most interesting to read, because these at least seemed to offer more detail into Gein’s psyche and society’s impotency to deal with him. In other words, the part which was most compelling as story wasn’t graphic at all.

History is difficult to write; “true crime” strays quite far from history even at its best, and so authors must settle upon and make clear what perspective they wish to explore. (Readers similarly must be wary of perspective, a faculty missing in so many “fan” reviews of the genre.) Schechter does alert readers to several of his sources and does offer points where some of his ideas are speculation. Kudos. What he does not do is choose a purpose for his telling; what he does not do is question his own assumptions.