Anthropophagy - humans eating their fellow-humans - creates a curious blend of revulsion and fascination in the 'civilised' Western world. When the perpetrator is a murderer - most commonly a sadistic serial killer - the crime not only shocks but it causes bewilderment.
With this 2015 update of her comprehensive 1993 study of cannibalistic killers, Moira Martingale expands her original research about the making of such monsters. Cannibal Killers tracked the phenomenon from five hundred years ago with the notorious Sawney Bean to those whose names became a byword for horror as the twentieth century waned, such as Jeffrey Dahmer.
In this updated version, we see that in the twenty-first century cannibals who thirst for human flesh and blood are still around, and alarmingly, they have moved online.
Moira Martingale is an author and a former journalist and columnist for national and regional newspapers. Cannibal Killers has been translated into several languages and is widely used as a research tool by criminology degree students. The author's interest in humanity's dark underbelly stems from her studies of clinical and abnormal psychology during her first degree. She also has a doctorate in Gothic Literature.
