Peter Haining (1940–2007)

So, I came across this little gem when I was browsing the $5.00 rack at my local used bookstore some years back. I think I went in trying to get the "Left Behind" series, and somehow ended up with this as well....go figure.

This book is comprised of 30 or so case studies of various cannibal murderers over the ages.

It starts off in the 3rd Century AD in the British Isles with the first known cannibal, a woman named Ethne the Dread, and moves through the years giving detailed accounts of show more murderous cannibals including but not limited to:

Sweeny Todd, Albert Fish, Jeffrey Dahmer, an enterprising sausage vendor circa WWII Germany, and that well documented, and made into a movie "internet" cannibal" somewhere in Europe who recorded his multi-hour encounter with a stranger who agreed to meet up for the intent to be killed and eaten. This is just a small sampling of what kind of people you will read and learn about.

Honestly? This is one of the guilty pleasure reads that I freely admit to because it is an easy read but filled with fascinating accounts of people I have never heard about and people who I only knew by name but not by details, and people I recall seeing in the news when it happened.

Cannibal Killers is non-fiction, but reads like a fiction anthology, and delivers more than enough examples of how man has killed and eaten man over the ages. The bonus of reading this book is becoming knowledgeable in such an esoteric topic that the information learned will surely win you bar bets and rounds of Jeopardy and Who wants to be a Millionaire.

For those of you still in school and looking for a book or topic source to write a paper for sociology, psychology, criminology, history or even philosophy this is the book for you..tons of citable sources and lots of great details...

I would suggest getting the dead tree version of this book since it has pictures and illustrations and can easily be found used. The best part is the conversation it starts when friends come over and see it parked between your "Learning Python for Dummies" and "What to Expect When Your're Expecting" on the bookshelf..Like that white collar worker who has piercings and tattoos under his shirt. show less

This is one of my favorite collections of stories of this kind. In it is Montague Summers' "The Grimoire", his only piece of fiction, offering delights of bibliomania and demonology; also Ambrose Bierce's piece on dreams, "Visions of the Night", in which he recounts a dream which prefigures Arthur Machen's capture of evil as that which goes against Nature ("evil is when flowers sing"), but also inspires a cynic's amusement. The Crowley story is among the most effective horror tales I have show more ever read - reminding me of aspects of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. "The Shifting Growth", written by John Gawsworth (Juan I) and Edgar Jepson, shares affinity with Crowley's tale, and is, well, uncommonly disturbing (as well as uncommonly anthologized). Acquire, enjoy, and wind through the labyrinth where you're led (to be lost). show less

This book is definitely a tad hit-and-miss, as so many 'compilations' are. I expected the whole book to be made up of funny editorial slips and mistakes but that isn't the case - which is a shame as these are the sections which work best and make the book worth a read.

The section on humorous spelling mistakes, and the hilarious group of exam and essay quotes from misguided literature students, had me crying with laughter. The literary graffiti found across the world's walls and the list of show more utterly random book titles were also very amusing. Other sections - on famous last words and the working titles of well-known books, for example - had paragraphs of author details that altered each example's focus and sometimes led me to skip entirely over the 'funny' punchline by mistake. They would have been more suited to a book of trivia and made me feel a bit bored and misled by the book description.

With a few of the quotes I found it hard to work out what was supposed to be making me laugh. There did seem to be an assumption that the reader was intimately familiar with the texts, which became particularly painful in the section on Bible misprints. Haining has to include the missing words in each example in brackets, and it just falls very, very flat in all but a couple of examples.

All in all, a patchy book - the variety show of literature. It's worth a look for the side-splitting strong areas, but maybe borrow it from the library instead of buying so you can skip over the dull sections without wasting your money! show less

Thank God I only read one of Peter Haining's anthologies. The mediocre stories here put me off seeking out any more of his editorial efforts.

If this wasn't already enough reason to avoid him, it has come to light in later years that Haining was an unrepentant plagiarizer, fabricator, and just plain liar. He would scavenge obscure pulp fare, rewrite it, and try to pass it off as the product another obscure but more desirable author. He would provide bogus references for the stories that were show more harder to investigate in the good ol' days. He edited texts without any acknowledgement, "borrowed" stories without attribution (or deliberately incorrect attribution), and generally did what he wanted while compiling his little anthologies.

Wonder why his anthologies are so mediocre? Besides cramming them with second rate real stories, He wasn't a particularly gifted writer even when trying to dress up third class fare. A pig with lipstick still looks like a pig!

Check out Douglas A. Anderson's entries in the "Wormwoodiana" blog for more interesting research about Mr. Haining. show less