The Gates of Janus

Ian Brady

Feral House has a history of presenting some of the best nonfiction the planet has to offer, all of it under the table (except Nightmare of Ecstasy, the Edward D. Wood Jr. bio Tim Burton used as the basis for his film Ed Wood). This is criminal. Feral House releases nonfiction for people who don't like nonfiction; the autobiography of a person who spent over half his juvenile life in prison, a reprint of a medieval text called Tortures and Torments of the Christian Martyrs, biographies of Anton LaVey, and the two most necessary anthologies of critical writing on the planet, Apocalypse Culture and Apocalypse Culture II, among others. Everyone, no matter who you are, is bound to find something to like in the Feral House nonfiction backlist.

Take, for example, our current specimen. A book on profiling serial killers. The first, to my knowledge, written by an actual serial killer to tackle this topic. Not just any old serial killer, mind you, but half the team known as the Moors Murderers. It's not as good as if Feral House editor Adam Parfrey had channeled Jack the Ripper, but it's close enough for government work. And Brady does himself a pretty fine job of book-writing.

It becomes immediately obvious that Ian Brady is not your average criminal. Thirty years in the joint, with access to a library, has obviously done very good things to his mind. He is well-read, critical, and plainly-spoken (of the three nonfiction books that have crossed my path this month, Brady is the author head and shoulders in first place in all three categories). With regards to the readability factor, The Gates of Janus is an undeniable winner.

Colin Wilson's introduction (one wonders why Brady, who has more than a few derogatory words for Wilson's own profiling attempts, asked him to write the introduction; perhaps Parfrey did, instead) smacks ever so faintly of sour grapes, but it does provide a surprisingly objective view of the book to follow, and can be taken at face value; the real meat of this book is the second part, in which Brady applies his ideas of serial killer profiling to a number of actual serial killers, including two who were never caught. (One wonders, idly, whether his chapter on the Torso killer, aka the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, is what has inspired renewed interest in the Torso case.) The first part Wilson refers to rather more derogatorily. I can't speak to it with an objective viewpoint, because I empathize far too much with Brady's words in the first section, as trite as some of them may be. The sociopath will find a great deal to enjoy in the first section; others may find that Wilson's estimation (which amounts to “self-aggrandizing silliness”) is right on the money.

The Gates of Janus may be best read in tandem with (or just after) Bolitho's much earlier Murder for Profit, since the two have a good deal in common. Both Bolitho and Brady were groundbreakers in their books, both focus extensively on case studies while injecting a good deal of person insight into the cases, both are exceptionally easy to read and understand. One wishes Brady had focused on one of the same cases Bolitho did to see if eighty years of police work in the interim had made profiling any better. (One wonders, amused, what Brady would have done with the case of Fritz Haarmann!)

A few words on the afterword written by one of today's finest authors, Peter Sotos. It almost seems to poor boy is settling down, mellowing out. (Maybe all that talk about stomach cancer in his own books wasn't just blowing smoke.) It starts off sounding like a toned-down Sotos, but does eventually wend its way around to the subject of Brady and his book, which surprised me somewhat. And he does regain his old fire at the end, drawing the connections necessary to label the book as child pornography under Sotos' own definition of the term (the leaps in logic used to do this are worth the price of the book on their own), but it becomes, perhaps, obvious why Sotos has been under the radar for so long. Perhaps he's becoming a kinder, gentler misanthrope? Not that, mind you, the afterword is bad; it's as brilliant as anything else the man has done. But it's more focused, for want of a better term.

There is nothing I can say about this book, in summary, other than “read it.” If you have problems with the first section, persevere; the case studies are more than worth it.