Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer

Today’s Nonfiction post is on Maniac: The Bath School Disaster and the Birth of the Modern Mass Killer by Harold Schechter.  It is 254 pages long and is published by Little A. The cover is a picture of the school. The intended reader is someone who is interested in historical true crime. There is very mild foul language, no sex, and violence in this book. There Be Spoilers Ahead.

From the dust jacket- Harold Schechter, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Hell’s Princess, unearths a nearly forgotten true crime of obsession and revenge, and one of the first—and worst—mass murders in American history.

In 1927, while the majority of the township of Bath, Michigan, was celebrating a new primary school—one of the most modern in the Midwest—Andrew P. Kehoe had other plans. The local farmer and school board treasurer was educated, respected, and an accommodating neighbor and friend. But behind his ordinary demeanor was a narcissistic sadist seething with rage, resentment, and paranoia. On May 18 he detonated a set of rigged explosives with the sole purpose of destroying the school and everyone in it. Thirty-eight children and six adults were murdered that morning, culminating in the deadliest school massacre in US history.

Maniac is Harold Schechter’s gripping, definitive, exhaustively researched chronicle of a town forced to comprehend unprecedented carnage and the triggering of a “human time bomb” whose act of apocalyptic violence would foreshadow the terrors of the current age.

Review- A horrific but interesting true crime from the 1920’s. Schechter does excellent research into this forgotten story of the worst mass killing in a school. Andrew Kehoe moved to Bath where his wife was from and they lived there for years without anyone knowing about his true nature. Kehoe was known to be an unpleasant man but he was not killing children or threatening anyone until something snapped. After that the reader watches in horror as Kehoe buys the explosives and sets about placing the bombs all over the school while he continues to work in the school and around the children that he will kill or at least wants to. When the bombs go off and the true horror of what Kehoe wanted to, I was horrified some 90 odd years in the future. This is not an easy book to read, not because of the writing, but because of how horrible the killer and his crime is. I would recommend but it is not for the faint of heart. 

I give this book a Four out of Five stars. I get nothing for my review and I borrowed this book from my local library.