The Monsters We Make by Rachel Corbett

Send us Fan Mail“The Monsters We Make is narrated so sagely and coolly, I almost didn’t realize how much it had to teach. It is a provoking, moving, and original book that has stuck with me long since I turned its last page.”— Maggie Nelson, New York Times best-selling author of The Argonauts“Serial killers have spawned hundreds of books, but none like this. With a daughter’s heart and a reporter’s keen gaze, Rachel Corbett turns the stories inside out. She profiles the profilers―their methods, their hubris, and the evils they unwittingly commit. An expertly titrated mix of history, true crime, and memoir, The Monsters We Make is the most intriguing crime book I’ve read in quite some time.”― Mary Roach, New York Times best-selling author of Fuzz, Gulp, and StiffHistory of Mystery book selections available in our Amazon Storefront or support your favorite local bookstore in our Bookshop Storefront as well! Guests have their own list here!Or if you happen to be in lovely Roanoke, Virginia, stop in person at the BiblioPub to get your copy.For bonus episodes and to get all episodes first, join our Patreon community.Watch clips from our conversations with guests!Rachel Corbett is a features writer at New York magazine and the author of You Must Change Your Life (Norton, 2016), which won the Marfield Prize, the National Award for Arts Writing, and The Monsters We Make (Norton, 2025). She has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and other publications. She grew up in Iowa and lives in New York City.Special guest Rachel Corbett joins Tea, Tonic & Toxin to discuss her book The Monsters We Make: Murder, Obsession, and the Rise of Criminal Profiling.Criminal profiling―the delicate art of collecting and deciphering the psychological “fingerprints” of the monsters among us―holds an almost mythological status in pop culture. But what exactly is it, does it work, and why is the American public so entranced by it? What do we gain, and endanger, from studying why people commit murder? In The Monsters We Make, author Rachel Corbett explores how criminal profiling became one of society’s most seductive and quixotic undertakings through five significant moments in its history.Rachel Corbett follows Arthur Conan Doyle through the London alleyways where Jack the Ripper butchered his victims, depicts the tailgate outside of Ted Bundy’s execution, and visits the remote Montana cabin where Ted Kaczynski assembled his antiestablishment bombs.Along the way emerge the people who studied and unraveled these cases. We meet self-taught psychologist Henry Murray, who profiled Adolf Hitler at the request of the U.S. government and later profiled his own students―including the future Unabomber―by subjecting them to cruel humiliation experiments. We also meet the prominent Yale psychiatrist Dorothy Lewis, who ended up testifying that Bundy was too sick to stand trial.Finally, Corbett takes the story into our own time, explaining the rise of modern “predictive policing” policies through a study of one Florida family that the analytics targeted―to devastating effects.With narrative intrigue and deft research, Corbett delves deep into the mythology and reality of criminal profilers, revealing how thin the line can be separating those who do harm and those who claim to stop it.Buy The Monsters We MakeRachel Corbett – Where the Story BeginsYour book begins on May 13, 1993, when you were six years old. Can you take us back to that day and tell us what happened?You knew Scott as a kind and protective person who seemed very different from your father. Years later, you learned that before taking his own life, he had killed his girlfriend and his dog. What was it like to discover that the story you’d grown up with wasn’t the whole story?You spent two years going through police records, interviewing witnesses, and trying to understand Scott. At one point you describe studying his photo for some visible trace of monstrosity. Did you feel that if you looked closely enough, there had to be an explanation?Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the Mystery TraditionThe Tea, Tonic & Toxin podcast and book club has discussed The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter, along with A Study in Scarlet and The Hound of the Baskervilles. The first criminal profilers were fictional. Rachel Corbett, how did Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle help create the idea of the criminal profiler?You write that profiling is often a “quixotic, haphazard blend of science and fiction.” Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t simply write Sherlock Holmes; he tried to apply Holmes’s methods to real crimes, including Jack the Ripper. What happens when a method that works great within the controlled universe of fiction gets applied to messy human reality?Sherlock Holmes begins with a clue and reasons backward toward a person. That’s immensely satisfying to readers. Has detective fiction taught us to expect real crime to be similarly solvable—that every behavior must ultimately point toward an answer?Crippen and LandruThe very best in short mystery fictionDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.Support the showhttps://www.instagram.com/teatonicandtoxin/https://www.facebook.com/teatonicandtoxinhttps://www.teatonicandtoxin.comStay mysterious...