Stranger Than Fiction

June 2026

Truly Shocking
by Dean Jobb

Our obsession with crime is likely as old as crime itself. Ghoulish stories told around campfires have morphed into podcasts and streaming series about sensational murders, just as lurid pamphlets recording the infamous crimes of centuries ago foreshadowed today’s explosion of true crime books. Here’s a roundup of recent titles that explore the guilty pleasures of crime and horror and why we can’t seem to get our fill of murder and mayhem.

For one movie critic, nine instalments of the Saw franchise of ultra-gory films was enough. When Spiral was released in 2021, Johnny Oleksinski of the New York Post condemned the movie and others of its bloody ilk as “completely and utterly worthless.” Fans of the franchise who flocked to theaters for their latest Saw fix, he added, were “depraved lunatics who should not be allowed near animals or most other living things.”

Coltan Scrivner, a behavioral scientist at Arizona State University who’s affiliated with the Recreational Fear Lab at Denmark’s Aarhus University, begs to differ. An expert on what scares us and why, he contends that people are drawn to the grisly and the macabre because they have no choice—it’s a form of voyeurism embedded in our DNA. We’re hardwired to be curious about acts of violence and threats to our lives and safety. Fans of blood and gore are not depraved lunatics. They’re products of evolution.

In Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away (Penguin Books), Scrivner defends our right to be shocked, appalled, and grossed out by what we watch, listen to, and read for entertainment. Fans of true crime and horror are not “sick people,” he argues, they’re “morbidly curious” about potential threats and dangers that surround us, from muggers to serial killers. He defines morbid curiosity as a fascination with one or more of four ghoulish subjects: physical violence, bodily injuries, the minds of dangerous people, and belief in paranormal dangers.

Just as wild animals learn to fear and avoid predators, humans have turned to storytelling to imagine the worst that two-legged predators can do to them, in case they are unfortunate enough to encounter the next Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. “When the costs of learning about a threat are low,” requiring us to simply watch a horror movie or read a true crime book, he writes, “it’s advantageous to pay attention and gather information.”

Accounts of crimes real and imagined offer lessons that can help us avoid becoming victims. Watching Ocean’s Eleven, Inventing Anna and other con artist flicks may help us to spot a fraudster trying to gain our trust and separate us from our money. Reading a true crime book that reveals the tricks of the burglary trade might prompt homeowners to invest in security systems. And anyone who’s read a murder mystery or watched a movie about serial killers and goes for a nighttime walk is likely to think twice about taking a shortcut down a darkened alley or through a dense forest.

Scrivner is the go-to guy when the New York Times, CNN, Time magazine and other major news media are looking for expert insights into our preoccupation with crime and horror. He is also a purveyor of frightening entertainment as executive director of the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival and an annual Zombie Crawl in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. Scrivner’s book publicists describe the latter as “one of the largest gatherings of zombies in the world,” but hopefully they mean one of the largest gatherings of people dressed as zombies.

Morbidly Curious guides readers through a maze of psychological and behavioral studies, including some Scrivner devised, that explore why we feel an urge to watch—and learn from—train wrecks. He explores evidence that exposure to fictional horror can have therapeutic benefits for some people, releasing tensions and fears and increasing empathy for others. He applies his theories about humans’ innate morbid curiosity to belief in ghosts and other paranormal phenomenon and even to our dreams. Nightmares, he argues, can be “threat simulators” as our minds play out scary scenarios we might someday encounter when awake. There’s plenty of food for thought here about why we’re drawn to true crime and the macabre, and how a good scare now and then just might be good for us.

Jeremy Dauber is less interested in why crime and horror fascinates us than in exploring how and when stories of darkness and evil became embedded in the nation’s cultural fabric. “You can write America’s history,” he asserts, “by tracking the stories it tells itself to unsettle its dreams, rouse its anxieties, galvanize its actions.” American Scary: A History of Horror, from Salem to Stephen King and Beyond (Algonquin Books) scours more than three centuries of unsettling stories, true and fictional, in search of clues to the roots of America’s gothic obsessions.

Dauber, a professor of Jewish literature and American studies at Columbia University, starts with the Puritans and their fervent belief that Satan and his demons walked among them. So strong was belief in sorcery and demonic possession that Massachusetts’ early lawmakers made witchcraft—vaguely defined as being, or consulting with, an evil spirit—a capital offence, just in time for the witch hysteria of the 1690s and the trial and execution of suspected witches at Salem. Americans graduated from imagining evildoers to fearing the tomahawks of indigenous peoples on the frontier and uprisings among the enslaved Africans in their midst. The American Revolution produced new real-life devils in the form of bloodthirsty British Redcoats and Hessian mercenaries.

Enter author Washington Irving, a member of the New York elite who tapped into this stream of homegrown fear with “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” published in 1820 and hailed by Dauber as the first great ghost story in American literature. The setting is a spooky Hudson Valley village where tales are told of a headless horseman who rides at night, said to be a Hessian soldier decapitated by a cannonball. The apparition pursues and either kills a local schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane, or frightens him so badly that he flees the community, never to return. The story, still a Hallowe’en staple, added a dash of Revolutionary history to the young nation’s deep-rooted fears of evil spirits.

Edgar Allan Poe, of course, was the most imaginative and influential creator of American horror of the nineteenth century—the Stephen King of his time, just as King could be regarded as the Poe of ours. The grotesque, twisted tales that sprang from his “sensational and sensationalist imagination,” Dauber writes, plus his fictionalized versions of horrific real-life crimes, raised the bar for literary shock and awe. The brutality of enslavement, carnage on Civil War battlefields, and real-life monsters such as Jack the Ripper and Chicago serial killer H.H. Holmes provided new fodder for writers of horror. Holmes’s chilling explanation for his 1890s killing spree—“I was born with the devil in me”—made the Salem witch trials seem like recent history. True crime also came into its own in that century, as lurid reports on murders, told “in remarkably gory detail … made celebrity monsters, and monster celebrities.”

Twentieth-century wars and the atomic age unleashed new horrors to inspire writers, and new “others”—alien invaders and science-fiction monsters—to scare us. Movies and radio brought horror to wider audiences and Alfred Hitchcock and other pioneers produced psychological thrillers that revealed threats that came not from outer space, but from next door. At every stage, real crimes and criminals were the subjects of nonfiction accounts or inspired fiction. A young Stephen King, we discover, kept a scrapbook of press clippings about Charles Starkweather, the teenager who murdered eleven people in Wyoming and Nebraska in the late 1950s. It was, King later said, his “first glimpse of the face of evil.”

Dauber proves his mastery of crime and horror literature on every page of American Scary, analyzing the works of famous authors and rescuing the obscure and the overlooked as he weaves this illuminating account. Like Scrivner, he concludes that we’re drawn to the horrific because we need to see it up close, to understand it. “You take the scary stuff,” Dauber writes, “and you put it into a form that you can control.”

Bestselling author Douglas Preston, whose nonfiction works include The Monster of Florence, which probes the crimes of an Italian serial killer, has his own theories of why people are drawn to true crime. We like dark stories that expose the extremes of human behavior, he writes in an introduction to The Best True Crime Stories of the Year 2025 (Crime Ink/Penzler Publishers), and “the darkest are true crime stories.” Laws must be enforced to maintain social order, he explains, and scientific studies suggest we’re genetically programed to want to see crimes avenged and criminals punished. “We like to see wrongdoers getting what they deserve,” especially from a safe distance as readers, listeners, or viewers.

This inaugural edition of what will become an annual compendium offers a dozen tales of crime and punishment. The collection’s editor, the aptly named Peter Crooks—a true crime author and former magazine editor—scoured newspapers, magazines, and online publications for stories he describes as “thrilling, deeply provocative, and ultimately enlightening.”

The stories run the gamut from attempted assault to murder, with segues into art theft, blackmail, wrongful convictions, and the rehabilitation of offenders. Contributor Justin St. Germain, a writing instructor and author of an acclaimed account of his mother’s murder, was polygraphed when he applied for a government job. He failed the test and turned the experience into a searing indictment of the unreliability of lie detectors and our uneasy relationship with the truth in an era when facts are fluid and opinions are weaponized.

A feature first published in Esquire revisits an Illinois man’s conviction twenty-five years ago for murdering his young daughter and presents disturbing evidence that the real killer escaped punishment. Another contribution, republished from Vanity Fair, is a profile of Clifford Schorer III, a little-known Sherlock Holmes of the art world who has tracked down stolen masterpieces and specializes in proving that overlooked or misattributed paintings are genuine Rembrandts or Turners. He’s an Indiana Jones of the artworld, armed with a computer and a keen eye for the real McCoy.

Two stories that made the cut are stranger than fiction. One, with the impossible-to-resist headline “Nudists Fight Off Pirate Terrorist,” recounts how two underdressed San Francisco men intervened when an unstable man wearing pirate garb threatened a tourist. The man was wielding a blowtorch but a more unlikely weapon figured in a Minnesota murder case—a moose antler. That’s sure to be a new one for even the most ardent—and curious—fans of true crime.

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Dean Jobb’s latest true crime book, A Gentleman and a Thief: The Daring Jewel Heists of a Jazz Age Rogue (Algonquin Books and HarperCollins Canada), is a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a national bestseller in Canada. It’s the story of Arthur Barry, who charmed the elite of 1920s New York City while planning and executing some of the most brazen jewel thefts in history. Find him at deanjobb.com.