Ed Gein: Psycho! - Softcover

"...he's right: it's a sick world, getting sicker... Paul Anthony Woods is a good researcher, and should be applauded for his nerve." -- Dr Steven Carver, from the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England

The life of Edward Gein is a dark legend. When the police raided his mid-western American farmhouse in November 1957, they found a gruesome cache that roused the Eisenhower era from its slumbers. Furniture constructed from human body parts, masks made from real faces - even a 'skin-suit' sewn together using the remains of deceased women. The madman had created a macabre private world from the depths of his imagination. Obsessed with his religious fanatic mother, the anatomy of women who reminded him of her, and the fundamentals of death itself, he graduated from grave robbery to murder. In a short time, he also entered modern folklore. In more than four decades since Gein was locked away in a mental institution, his story has bled its way into popular culture: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960) based the mother-fixated Norman Bates on the oedipal Gein; The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) replicated the nightmare world of his isolated farmhouse; The Silence of the Lambs (1991) featured a grotesque 'skin transvestite' based on Gein. Summer 2001 now sees the UK release of Ed Gein - the first time filmmakers have dared tell the story without a leavening of fiction. Ed Gein - Psycho! is a cult favourite, re-telling Gein's story in the style of the pulp fiction that his case inspired.

Selling over 25,000 copies in the USA, it has been updated for a UK edition which includes an illustrated analysis of Ed Gein (2001). With 50 illustrations, ranging from shots of Gein's arrest and personal documentation through to stills from the new film, the book is an exhaustive trawl through the crime case that became ingrained in popular legend.