The Killer Within: In the Company of Monsters
In true-crime works such as The Night Stalker (2006) and Gaspipe: Confessions of a Mafia Boss (2008), Carlo used his uncanny interviewing skills and straightforward prose style to create disturbing portraits of real-life serial killers. Now he turns his attention on a very different type of killer: amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease, an affliction Carlo was diagnosed with in 2005. As with his bluntness in recounting the brutal facts of his subjects’ crimes, Carlo holds nothing back in describing his daily struggles being confined to a wheelchair, getting his meals fed to him, and facing some bureaucratic hurdles in trying to obtain a breakthrough drug for his illness. The ordeal also provokes the author to reflect back on his formative years in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, where he rubbed elbows with future mafiosi and witnessed his first murder. The combination of Carlo’s knack for anecdote spinning and his own heartbreaking, yet ennobling, confrontation with ALS results in a unique and spellbinding memoir. --Carl Hays