uti_survivor 's review for:

The Gates of Janus: Serial Killing and Its Analysis by Ian Brady

3.0

---

a mixed bag! the foreward and introduction both fellate Brady to a mind-numbing degree, and i'd recommend a quick explainer on Brady and Hindley's crimes in its place as it offers pretty much nothing but myth-making that Brady doesn't really deserve. the text itself is pretty good, when Brady isn't going off on how great he is he actually makes decent cases for moral relativism and rightly implicates class power structures as the exogenous factors beneath serial sexual murder, and some of his forensic analysis is quite interesting. as you can guess, i really enjoyed the Peter Sotos afterword, which acts as a fine foil to the rest of the book by reminding you of Brady's cowardice, the things he's afraid to reveal in his grandoise text, and the real and not rhetorical impact of his crimes on the families of his victims.