A HISTORY OF EVIL IN POPULAR CULTURE

I think that I mentioned in one of my first blogs that I had 120,000 words written on The Last Murder with three chapters to go when I learned from my publisher that the word limit on the book was going to be 80,000 words. That caused me to go back with a meat cleaver and cut out what I believed to be a lot of interesting stories AND to collapse the last three chapters into a single chapter. I got the word count down to 90,000 or 100,000 and the publisher was satisfied.

I had some good stories about the post-conviction proceedings which went untold, and I had some words I wanted to say about the phenomenon of celebrity killers. I haven't had the opportunity to tell the story of the post-conviction circus (I probably never will), but I did get an opportunity to say some things about celebrity killers. I was invited to write a chapter for a book of essays entitled A History of Evil in Popular Culture (edited by Dr. Sharon Packer & Jody W. Pennington). They asked me to talk about the near-cult status Bundy gained as a celebrity killer, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity. 

At the time I had no idea how enormous a task the editors had set for themselves. A History of Evil in Popular Culture turned out to be a two volume, 850 page work.  It is set for publication in July of 2014 and is currently available for pre-order. I have no financial interest at all in the book, other than the fact that they're going to give me a free copy. It looks like I'm going to have to clear a good bit of shelf space to accommodate it.