Story-Portal

From bookflaps:
On the night of July 22, 1972, Earl Harmen thought it would be a good idea to have a party. There’d be grass, beer, pills, maybe some paint to sniff, the house would be dark, and Earl would have his laughs. So he sent his buddy Lee Criley to fetch some people, and the fun began. By party’s end, a boy and a girl were handcuffed naked to a wooden board, Lee Criley was in a nervous daze, and Earl Harmen was shot dead.
But what the police stumble upon the following morning turns out to be more than a freak murder after a night of pot and pills. For years, West Haven had been plagued with a disproportionate number of missing boys whose frantic parents refused to accept the police’s judgment that they were simply runaways. Now, with Lee Criley’s bone-chilling testimony, the mystery of the disappearances was slowly being solved. The slain Earl Harmen, thirty-three, whom his neighbors considered a nice, quiet man, was in reality the perpetrator of a series of monstrous murders involving torture and homosexual assault. He was a deranged Pied Piper, leading, and loving, the children of his township to death.
The subject is mass murder, and author Robert Paier is not afraid to confront it head on. He tells the story of the murders frankly and tastefully and delves into the backgrounds of Harmen and Criley, seeking answers to their demented and antisocial acts. What, for instance, are the crippling factors that turn a man into a mass murderer? Where, along the line, do hate and love become tangled in a man’s mind and the urge to destroy a part of everyday reality? The Pied Piper is, in some ways, a frightening book to read. But it is also an intriguing one—captivating in its suspense and stunning for its revelations.

Quote: Though written with non-exploitative calm and relative restraint, this novelization of a homosexual's mass-murder of teenage boys (apparently modeled on a recent Texas case, not the very recent Chicago one) still never works as fiction - only as non-fiction manqu‚, lacking the crucial, chilling resonance of True Crime. Revelation of the ""most heinous series of crimes in the history of the United States"" begins when West Haven, Conn., police arrest foul young Lee Criley after his murder of 33-year-old Earl Harmen. Not only does Criley confess to killing Harmen but also to helping Harmen in the now-and-then torture and murder of 27 teenagers--and he leads the cops to where the bodies are buried. As the corpses are unearthed, Paier flashes back to sketch in Harmen's psycho-history: adored by an adulterous mother, raped by a brutal stepfather, repelled by normal sex, repressed and alone in the Army and at home till adopting the role of big-brother to neighborhood kids. With occasional lapses (""the monster, the powerful, blood-crazed animal""), Paler mostly lets the quiet, never more explicit than necessary, description of Harmen's hideous crimes generate the horror--with some truly ghastly moments when Paler imagines the thoughts of some of the youngest victims. But aside from such moments, and despite the relatively convincing psycho-portraits of Harmen and his somehow-even-worse accomplice, this mockup has neither the depth and development of fiction nor the In Cold Blood aura of fact. Still, the documentary style will encourage some thrill-seeking readers to disregard that word "novel" on the cover.