CRIMEHQ BOOK CLUB
CRIMEHQ BOOK CLUB
We're partnering with the best publishers and authors in the world to help you discover extraordinary new true crime, mystery, and crime novels.
This isn't just your ordinary book club.
We have discussion questions for you to follow along with as you make your way through the book and live events.
Current Book Selection
November-December 2021
Boys Enter the House: The Victims of John Wayne Gacy and the Lives They Left
By David Nelson
With the help of family, friends, and lovers, the victims of John Wayne Gacy tell their side of the story, a coming-of-age tale of love, poverty, and tragedy playing out across the most vibrant neighborhoods of 1970s Chicago.
"Here is a work that emphasizes the full view of the lives of those young people that Gacy took...It is essentially the Gacy story in reverse. Victims first." —Jeff Coen, author of Murder in Canaryville.
As investigators brought out the bagged remains of several dozen young men from a small Chicago ranch home and paraded them in front of a crowd of TV reporters and spectators, attention quickly turned to the owner of the house. John Gacy was an upstanding citizen, active in local politics and charities, famous for his themed parties and appearances as Pogo the Clown. But in the winter of 1978–79, he became known as one of many so-called "sex murderers" who had begun gaining notoriety in the random brutality of the 1970s. As public interest grew rapidly, victims became footnotes and statistics, lives lost not just to violence, but to history.Through the testimony of siblings, parents, friends, lovers, and other witnesses close to the case, Boys Enter the House retraces the footsteps of these victims as they make their way to the doorstep of the Gacy house itself.
LIVE Q&A with Author David Nelson
✦ December 28th at 7p ET
David Nelson is the author of several short stories published in the Rappahannock Review, TishmanReview, and Another Chicago Magazine. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and received honorable mentions from Glimmer Train. His coverage of ongoing war crime trials and the DNA identification process for victims of the Balkans conflicts was published by the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR). A graduate of Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Nelson has been researching the John Wayne Gacy case since 2012, when he published an update on the case's developments for Medill.
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