Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #545712 in Books
• Published on: 1998-10-19
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Gordon Burn has already written a book about serial killer Peter Sutcliffe so it should be no surprise (apart from wondering at his stamina for this sort of material) that he has also taken on the macabre story of the Wests. This is a vile catalogue of the manner in which Frederick and Rosemary West raped, tortured and killed. It spares none of the utterly sordid details.

Burn, who has also written two acclaimed novels (Alma Cogan and Fullalove), has opted to apply some of the techniques of fiction to this grisly task. But while this approach does raise ethical questions--he sometimes recounts scenes and emotions that only the participants, and they are dead, could have witnessed--such is his obvious seriousness of intent that these episodes can be justified in narrative terms. The vast compilation of awful but indisputable facts inevitably makes the prosaic detail of the Wests' lives, like Fred's endless DIY and Rose's Sunday lunches, almost unbearably sinister. And the ghastly details of their victims' fates are unspeakably depraved. Britain has seen nothing like this scale of domestic degradation before. But while every reader must decide for themselves how much of this they need to know, and how much they want to know, it is nevertheless right and commendable that Gordon Burn has written this chilling book and thus given people the choice. --Nick Wroe

Synopsis
An account of the lives of Fred and Rose West, the Gloucestershire couple who abused and murdered their own children, as well as visitors to their house.

Customer Reviews

The Best of the Wests
I've read every book available out there about the horrific West case and this one is by far my favourite and always the one I recommend to a newcomer interested in true crime.

It occurs to me whenever I read this that Gordon Burn has almost lived inside the minds of Fred and Rose. If I didn't know better, I would think he was part of their family and had seen all of the atrocities they commited first hand. Perhaps he's just a very fine writer, or a naturally gifted psychologist, but this man KNOWS the West case like no other author I'm aware of.

Oh for a decent editor....
I bought this book because I really enjoyed "Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son" by the same author. SHSS is an amazing book, well written and well researched.

However, this is a dreadful book - I can hardly believe it is by the same author. There is lots of information about the Wests and the case, but it is so badly written. It is repetitive - sometimes repeating the same fact five or six times in a single paragraph - it is contradictory and inconsistent, and, in places, the grammar is so bad that I actually wondered if he was quoting the illiterate Fred West and had just forgotten the quotation marks. It jumps about in time, repeating the same tale several points throughout the book, but with no particular literary reason for doing so. It actually reads like the author has just compiled his rough notes with no regard for literary flow.

This book needs a good editor to go through it thoroughly, remove the repitition and improve the writing flow. It would be half the size if the repitition was removed and a decent structure implemented.

Don't take "Somebody's Husband, Somebody's Son" as being a guideline for this book. SHSS is the Rolls Royce of crime writing - "Happy Like Murderers" is a rusty bicycle with a wheel missing.

Happy Like Murderers
This is not a book for everyone. Harrowing, it details the lives of Fred and Rose West. Extremely difficult to read, I did almost give up half-way as it was upsetting but I kept on as it felt to me the author was not only chronicling the lives of the West's but perhaps more importantly the lives of their victims.

There is real effort to imbue the victims with as much life and personality as is possible under very difficult circumstances. To give them an identity beyond the photographs printed in the press. For them, I kept reading.

I liked the author's writing style, especially the way information was layered in each chapter, the significance of events in one chapter not realised until later chapters, but the impact just as shocking.