Everything you ever wanted to know about axe-murder.

Rachel McCarthy James spins a vivid yarn of the history of this most prosaic of murder weapons. As long as humans have had axes, a transformative and versatile tool, we have also used them to end other human’s lives. As long as we’ve used them to chop tree branches, we’ve also used them to sever human limbs, really the comparisons are endless. More dramatic than a knife but easier to use than a sword, McCarthy James sets out to delve into the “why” behind this particular form of homicide.

All the classics are here, Lizze Borden gets a chapter mostly to herself (I think she was innocent, by the way) and the iconic axe centric scene in The Shining gets a moment in the limelight as well. But more interesting are the lesser known axe-murders through history, Freydis of Greenland, Seqenre Tao, and William Tillman (who takes the prize for the most based axe murder in this or any other book, seriously, look him up and get that man a movie deal).

Through it all the writing is vivid, cogent, and rapid, reading this is like taking a tour of an especially macabre museum from a funny but very well informed tour guide. While the details can be shocking even in our violence saturated age (holy crap was the chapter on Linda Joyce Glucoft upsetting on a visceral level), this book is ultimately informative and offers a meditative view on an oft sensationalized topic.