So we have the two main characters having freaky, realistic dreams.  Other people seeing apparitions of a headless horseman with a sword, but then he just disappears without a trace.  And to top it all off we have a psycho going around killing people, calling himself Lord Halloween.  It's shaping up to be a pretty good read!

I really found the layout of this book annoying. Told almost in a encyclopedia format, it just gave snippets of the murderers and their victims. Not enough to really get to know the behind the scenes story. I think I will give the authors full length novels a try though.

Kinda creeped out and horribly excited about reading this book!!

I won Psycho USA: Famous American Killers You Never Heard Of through the Goodreads First Read Giveaway on 08/23/2012 and received on 09/04/2012!

I was really surprised with how much I enjoyed this book! I absolutely LOVED how Schechter would state what authors were influenced by certain murders and where they used that inspiration. I found that to be a wonderful surprise when I started the book.

You hear about all of these horrific stories from not too long ago and the media makes it seem like it is the first incident of it's kind ... in reality, I learned that that isn't the case.

Such an intriguing book ... one I'll definitely read again because I'm sure in all of my (rushed) reading that I missed some important details. I need to learn to slow down and enjoy a story without rushing through it just to see what happens next!

Very interesting book - easy to pick up and put down because there are tons of small stories in this mammoth book!

Psycho USA is one of those nonfiction novels that are interesting without containing a lot of substance. The individual stories themselves are curious in their macabre details but contain little else other than a rundown of the events and persons involved. In spite of the lack of details or insight, among the collection of killers are quite a few that are memorable either for their collective interest or from sheer horror at the crimes. These include the “American Borgias” and the fascination/use of arsenic as the go-to poison for housewives everywhere, as well as Charles Freeman and his wife, who murdered their daughter out of religious zeal, convinced she too would rise after three days and signify the advent of the Second Coming. Essentially, Mr. Schechter’s findings showcase that people are willing to commit the most atrocious of acts for a multitude of reasons.Psycho USA reads like a Dateline expose, broken up by date and divided into easily tackled chapters on individual killers who made headlines and then faded into obscurity. This makes it an easy book to set down and even easier to avoid picking back up for further reading. The information presented is fairly sensationalized, as Mr. Schechter uses direct quotes from news sources of the period, complete with its embellished language. After a while, the stories do tend to bleed into one another, making it difficult to distinguish one killer from another and doing much to prove how quickly a person can become desensitized to the most gruesome crimes.Mr. Schechter is not afraid to use judgmental language in describing the killers he is referencing. While its usage ties together his own words with those from the newspapers and court documents he frequently quotes, a reader will still be surprised given the fact that nonfiction is best without the personal opinion of its author interspersed among its pages. Still, it is unpredictably appropriate given the subject matter. He is describing psychopaths and sociopaths who were found guilty of some absolutely horrific crimes against others. Being pronounced as evil or depraved is fitting if unconventional.What is truly interesting is the lingering question as to why some crimes capture the imaginations of an entire population and never leave the collective consciousness and yet others, equally ghastly, quickly become forgotten and slip into oblivion. Mr. Schechter cannot answer this question as to why even today, people remember Andrea Yates but not Dena Schlosser, nor does he really try to solve this mystery. It is a question to be answered another day and perhaps by another author, but a reader will frequently ponder it as reading about these killers who remain inexplicably forgotten. In fact, it is an opportunity lost that would have made Psycho USA go from merely interesting to absolutely fascinating.While Psycho USA is brutal in its graphic descriptions and highly judgmental language used to describe each killer, it is easy for a reader to distance oneself from all of the horror and depraved violence depicted. Without an overarching narrative to tie the individual vignettes together, it is a book meant to be read in pieces, thereby furthering the reader’s ability to remove oneself emotionally from the details. Interesting without being thought-provoking, Psycho USA is more “fun facts” than serious academic psychoanalysis of the human mind.Acknowledgments: Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for my e-galley!

There's nothing I love more than reading about some true crime--the more unknown the better. Sure, I like learning new things about all the cases I've already heard about but it doesn't beat learning about it for the first time. I'm not ashamed to say I hadn't heard about any cases gone into detail here. The little asides, especially the ones about "murder ballads" were also fascinating. Everything about this book is a five star for your average true crime connoisseur.a copy was given to me by a publisher via netgalley for an honest review.