What a grueling and annoyingly pretentious read this was!
I had hoped for a decent expose of the Dahmer case, perhaps containing some new valid insights, written by someone who was able to interview the various parties involved. Instead, Brian Masters' book is a never-ending stream of psychobabble, combined with the author's criticism of everyone from the psychologist witnesses at the trial, to law enforcement, to the American justice system, all accompanied by the strong implication that Masters "knows better."
Forget the precious literary allusions, the rather lengthy pages which discourse lyrically and needlessly on the Dionysian aspects of the case. Forget the extensive quote from the play "Equus". Forget the fact that Masters (an Englishman) seems to find the American judicial system barbaric, its judges incompetent and its lawyers arbitrary. Much of the portion of the book dealing with the trial is in the form of Masters' harsh criticisms of the judge's rulings and the attorneys' conduct. The balance of those passages seem naught but Masters' flaunting his own acumen above that of the mental health professional who testified.
Masters, you see, has a theory -- a theory that, according to him, would have shed far greater light on the Dahmer proceedings if ONLY his colleagues in the mental health field had seen what was, to Masters, abundantly clear. Apparently, Dahmer had a very painful hernia operation as a child and, throughout the book, Masters hoists this event as his own personal "Ah HA! moment" which, he implies, explains much of what makes Dahmer tick.
Masters also seems to focus on the cannibalistic acts, albeit briefly, as affecting causation. However, the author's stress on cultural and historic aspects of cannibalism from an anthropological point of view are disproportionately lengthy in comparison to how he applies them to the Dahmer case. While Masters' research into this phenomena may have been intense and thorough, it struck me as an attempt to impress the reader with the author's vast knowledge of the subject and, for me, it was hardly worth the effort of reading.
I found nothing innovative about the the Dahmer case in my reading of this book. Though the work does not go so far as to become a case of what I often call "crackpot" psychology, it certainly seeks to over-simplify the case for what seems to be the author's self aggrandisement.
If you are a psychologist, or interested in such things, you may think that this book and Masters' theories interesting. As for me, I found most of the book to be egoistic and boring. In spite of the impressive blurbs on the cover from such as Patricia Highsmith, I cannot recommend it.