Mikita Brottman

Critically acclaimed author and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman offers literary true crime writing at its best, taking us into the life of a murderer after his conviction—when most stories end but the defendant's life goes on. On February 21, 1992, 22-year-old Brian Bechtold walked into a police station in Port St. Joe, Florida and confessed that he’d shot and killed his parents in their family home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said he’d been possessed by the devil. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and ruled “not criminally responsible” for the murders on grounds of insanity. But after the trial, where do the "criminally insane" go? Brottman reveals Brian's inner life leading up to the murder, as well as his complicated afterlife in a maximum security psychiatric hospital, where he is neither imprisoned nor free. During his 27 years at the hospital, Brian has tried to escape and been shot by police, and has witnessed three patient-on-patient murders. He’s experienced the drugging of patients beyond recognition, a sadistic system of rewards and punishments, and the short-lived reign of a crazed psychiatrist-turned-stalker. In the tradition of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Couple Found Slain is an insider’s account of life in the underworld of forensic psych wards in America and the forgotten lives of those held there, often indefinitely.

After a Family Murder

Couple Found Slain

Reading Literature in a Men's Prison

The Maximum Security Book Club

Contra la lectura

An Unexplained Death is an obsessive investigation into a mysterious death at the Belvedere—a once-grand hotel—and a poignant, gripping meditation on suicide and voyeurism “The poster is new. I notice it right away, taped to a utility pole. Beneath the word ‘Missing,’ printed in a bold, high-impact font, are two sepia-toned photographs of a man dressed in a bow tie and tux.” Most people would keep walking. Maybe they’d pay a bit closer attention to the local news that evening. Mikita Brottman spent ten years sifting through the details of the missing man’s life and disappearance, and his purported suicide by jumping from the roof of her own apartment building, the Belvedere. As Brottman delves into the murky circumstances surrounding Rey Rivera’s death—which begins to look more and more like a murder—she contemplates the nature of and motives behind suicide, and uncovers a haunting pattern of guests at the Belvedere, when it was still a historic hotel, taking their own lives on the premises. Finally, she fearlessly takes us to the edge of her own morbid curiosity and asks us to consider our own darker impulses and obsessions.

The True Story of a Body at the Belvedere

An Unexplained Death

Sex, God, and Murder in Tallahassee, Florida 

Guilty Creatures 

"When Ruth's empty-nest depression hits perilous depths, her pastor husband suggests Windfall Lodge: a lovely rustic estate/ house of rest, where she and other emotionally troubled wives and mothers might find the treatment they need, the peace and purpose they crave. But there is something unsettling in Windfall's cryptic therapy and isolating rules. And slowly, suspicion turns to dread, as Ruth begins to discover the terrible fate that she and the rest are actually being prepared for..." --

House of Quiet Madness

An exploration of the value of reading challenges the notion that nonreaders are doomed to lives of mental decay, asserting instead that reading is ultimately a vessel for self-exploration that is not without its dangers.

Against Reading

The Solitary Vice

THIRTEEN GIRLS is a casebook that plumbs the annals of "true crime," delivering thirteen bracing stories of murder and its emotional fallout. Each fictionalized narrative is based on a real victim of a serial killer, and each is told from a different perspective -- a mother, a shrink, a cop, a sister -- to reveal the stark afterlife of human carnage. Leveraging the emotional power of personal testimony, Mikita Brottman presents an unblinking psychological portrait of murder, a dark descent that illuminates our cultural obsession with violence and the need for "closure" that persists in the hearts and minds of those who live in its wake. - from back cover.

Thirteen Girls

A riveting account of the two years literary scholar Mikita Brottman spent reading literature with criminals in a maximum-security men’s prison outside Baltimore, and what she learned from them—Orange Is the New Black meets Reading Lolita in Tehran. On sabbatical from teaching literature to undergraduates, and wanting to educate a different kind of student, Mikita Brottman starts a book club with a group of convicts from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. She assigns them ten dark, challenging classics—including Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” and Nabokov’s Lolita—books that don’t flinch from evoking the isolation of the human struggle, the pain of conflict, and the cost of transgression. Although Brottman is already familiar with these works, the convicts open them up in completely new ways. Their discussions may “only” be about literature, but for the prisoners, everything is at stake. Gradually, the inmates open up about their lives and families, their disastrous choices, their guilt and loss. Brottman also discovers that life in prison, while monotonous, is never without incident. The book club members struggle with their assigned reading through solitary confinement; on lockdown; in between factory shifts; in the hospital; and in the middle of the chaos of blasting televisions, incessant chatter, and the constant banging of metal doors. Though The Maximum Security Book Club never loses sight of the moral issues raised in the selected reading, it refuses to back away from the unexpected insights offered by the company of these complex, difficult men. It is a compelling, thoughtful analysis of literature—and prison life—like nothing you’ve ever read before.

This serious look at films that have disgusted, appalled, offended, and repelled reveals how such forbidden films have a great deal to teach us about the human condition.

Offensive Films

Hyenas are almost universally regarded as nasty, scheming charlatans that skulk in the back alleyways of the animal kingdom. They have been scorned for centuries as little more than scavenging carrion-eaters, vandals, and thieves. Here to restore the Hyena’s reputation is Mikita Brottman, who offers an alternate view of these mistreated and misunderstood creatures and proves that they are complex, intelligent, and highly sociable animals. Investigating representations of the hyena throughout history, Brottman divulges that the hyena, though shrouded in taboo, has been the source of talismanic objects since the ancient Greek and Roman empires. She discovers that many cultures use parts of the hyena—from excrement and blood to genitalia and hair—to make charms that both avert evil and promote fertility. Brottman also considers representations of hyenas in today’s popular fiction, including The Lion King and The Life of Pi,where they are often depicted as villains, cowardly henchmen, or clowns, while ignoring their more noble qualities. Rightly returning hyenas to their proper place in the animal pantheon, this richly illustrated book will be enjoyed by any animal lover with an interest in the unusual and offbeat.

Hyena

“Mikita Brottman is one of today’s finest practitioners of nonfiction.” —The New York Times Book Review Critically acclaimed author and psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman offers literary true crime writing at its best, taking us into the life of a murderer after his conviction—when most stories end but the defendant's life goes on. On February 21, 1992, 22-year-old Brian Bechtold walked into a police station in Port St. Joe, Florida and confessed that he’d shot and killed his parents in their family home in Silver Spring, Maryland. He said he’d been possessed by the devil. He was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia and ruled “not criminally responsible” for the murders on grounds of insanity. But after the trial, where do the "criminally insane" go? Brottman reveals Brian's inner life leading up to the murder, as well as his complicated afterlife in a maximum security psychiatric hospital, where he is neither imprisoned nor free. During his 27 years at the hospital, Brian has tried to escape and been shot by police, and has witnessed three patient-on-patient murders. He’s experienced the drugging of patients beyond recognition, a sadistic system of rewards and punishments, and the short-lived reign of a crazed psychiatrist-turned-stalker. In the tradition of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Couple Found Slain is an insider’s account of life in the underworld of forensic psych wards in America and the forgotten lives of those held there, often indefinitely.

The Solitary Vice will make you rethink your own relation to reading. Brottman is wonderful at reminding us what a very complicated act - of fantasy, recompense, adventurism and (sometimes) perversity - reading a book can be....

The best-selling study of cannibals in both real life and cinema, with illustrated reports on cannibal killers Ed Gein, Albert Fish and Jeffrey Dahmer, plus reviews of cannibal movies such as 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre', 'Cannibal Holocaust' and others. This brand new, updated and expanded edition includes an extra chapter on Flesh-Eating Zombies in classic horror movies like George A Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead', Lucio Fulci's 'Zombi 2' and Peter Jackson's 'Braindead', plus a new, full colour section of extreme screen gore, and a report on new cannibal movies e.g. 'Hannibal

Meat is Murder!

A unique addition to the scant literature which examines those films that have in one way or another been associated with death. Starting with the earliest Hollywood suicides and jinxed movies, to the death cult of James Dean, to links with Charles Manson, Satanic churches, snuff culture and mass murders, plus the mysterious death of Bruce Lee, and the equally strange demise of his son Brandon, HOLLYWOOD HEX discloses the dark enigmatic connections between cinematic narratives and human catastrophe, forming a psuchogeographic study of this fascinating Dream factory.

Mikita Brottman

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