Murderers who eat the people they kill have existed throughout human history, but until the advent of the Internet they operated in the shadows, governed by shame and secrecy. Online, they can now find not only their next victim, but other like-minded monsters.
Anthropophagy – humans eating their fellow-humans – creates a curious blend of revulsion and fascination. When the perpetrator is a murderer – most commonly a sadistic serial killer – the crime is not only shocking, but also bewildering.
Moira Martingale’s comprehensive study, Cannibal Killers: The Impossible Monsters , was originally written in 1993, when the Internet was in its infancy, when few homes had computers and when the character Hannibal Lecter from the book and movie The Silence of the Lambs was regarded as an entirely fictional character, with no real-world counterparts or inspirations. The book demonstrated that this was an erroneous assumption. Translated into several languages and widely used as a resource by students studying for criminology degrees, this seminal work tracked the phenomenon of cannibalistic murderers throughout history, from the monstrous Sawney Bean, who killed and ate hundreds of travellers in Scotland five hundred years ago, to Jeffrey Dahmer, Andrei Chikatilo, Ed Kemper and Issei Sagawa – all loners, hiding their most terrible of secrets.
Then came the World Wide Web. In this comprehensively updated edition we see that in the twenty-first century cannibals who thirst for human flesh and blood are still among us, and, alarmingly, they have moved online to find their victims.
About the Author
Moira Martingale is a journalist, former columnist and feature writer for national and regional newspapers and magazines including the Birmingham Post, the Liverpool Echo, the Sunday Times and the Sun. She is the author of Ghostbusters and the original Cannibal Killers: The Impossible Monsters . In the 1980s she wrote substantially in newspapers about the formerly taboo subject of child sexual abuse, especially within families. Prior to this, no newspapers had been courageous enough to expose this hidden issue; afterwards many campaigners continued to publicise the topic within national UK media and, later, internationally.
Martingale's previous books were published in the UK and worldwide by various publishers. She has B. Ed. and MSc. degrees in English Literature and Psychology and a doctorate in Gothic Literature. Studying abnormal psychology gave her a particular interest in the darker aspects of the human psyche - child abuse remains a bete noir - and she has just completed a novel which explores multiple personality disorder.
She lives in Worcestershire, England, and Carcassonne, France.
