Waste Land: The Savage Odyssey Of Charles Starkweather And Caril Ann Fugate

"Eleven years before another Charlie--Manson--told Americans to watch out for their homicidal children, [Charlie] Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate drove the message home with blades and bullets, stopping only when their car ran out of gas and they ran out of luck. If [James] Dean and [Marlon] Brando were the poster children for a generation run amok, then Starkweather and Fugate were the word made flesh. Their bloody trek across the heartland represents a turning point as grim and critical as Dallas or Kent State. It taught Americans to look for enemies around the breakfast table, rather than in Moscow or Havana."

Michael Newton, author of Bad Girls Do It! and other books about serial murder, combines an energetic prose style with extensive research to tell the tale of this famous 1958 pair of spree killers from Lincoln, Nebraska. Caril is a bit of a blank--just a sullen, peevish 14-year-old--but Charlie comes eerily alive in this book: his red hair, his slanted green eyes, his bowlegged strut, his resemblance to James Dean before he'd even seen Dean in a movie. He was the third child of seven in an outwardly normal family, but somehow he got a chip on his shoulder and thought the world had him "numbered for the bottom." Waste Land invites us into Charlie and Caril's world, then takes on a creepy, suspenseful ride through the eight days that left 11 people dead. --Fiona Webster