
Picture Credit: Fairfax County Public Library.
Humans are fascinated by evil. We wonder where it comes from and whether we ourselves could ever carry out such an act. Some readers turn to crime fiction for answers, while others prefer true crime. Of course, there is a vicarious frisson for the fan of either – the reader stands at the shoulder of monsters without being endangered.
Ian Rankin.
Note: I felt very uncomfortable putting this post together, but for the sake of learning more about a genre I very rarely dive into, I pushed through. Just assume that I’ve tagged this list with every single trigger warning you can think of; this is disturbing stuff. If you think this might be too much for you, it probably is.