Overview

Steel and Shadow: The Dnipropetrovsk Murders and the Dawn of Digital Nihilism In the summer of 2007, three teenagers from the Ukrainian city of Dnipropetrovsk committed twenty-one murders in three weeks, targeting the elderly, the vulnerable, and children with a carpenter's hammer carried in a yellow plastic bag. They filmed their crimes. One video, the killing of forty-eight-year-old cancer survivor Sergei Yatzenko, circulated globally and continues to circulate today, making the case one of the most disturbing criminal episodes of the digital age. Steel and Shadow is not simply a true crime account of what happened. It is a forensic examination of why it happened, tracing the psychological development of the perpetrators through the institutional wreckage of post-Soviet Ukraine, analysing the role of internet gore culture and deliberate desensitisation in dismantling normal human inhibition, and centring, always, the twenty-one lives that the summer consumed. Drawing on criminological research, social psychology, and the detailed record of the investigation and trial, Irish crime writer Liam Lomasney constructs a meticulous, morally serious account of a case that forced criminologists to propose an entirely new typology of serial violence: the digital nihilist killer, whose primary motive is not sex, money, or politics, but the creation of a permanent violent legacy in the only medium that guarantees permanence, the internet.

Full Product Details

9798233976322

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Liam Lomasney is an Irish crime reporter and author whose work examines violent crime across cultural and historical boundaries with the analytical rigour of a journalist and the narrative depth of a historian. Born and raised in Ireland, Lomasney brings to his writing an outsider's eye - the capacity to observe the social and institutional landscapes of other cultures with the particular clarity that comes from standing slightly apart from them - combined with a deep commitment to the forensic and psychological research that distinguishes serious true crime writing from sensationalism. His books have ranged across American, European, and Asian criminal cases, consistently pursuing the questions that interest him most: how ordinary social environments produce extraordinary violence, how institutions fail the people in their care, and how the victims of violent crime can be recovered from the case files that reduce them to data and restored to the full human complexity they possessed before they became subjects of investigation. He brings to the Dnipropetrovsk case a particular interest in the intersection of post-Soviet social history and modern criminological theory, and in the questions about digital culture and criminal contagion that the case raises with an urgency that has only increased in the years since the murders were committed. He lives in Ireland, where he continues to write about crime, history, and the societies that produce both.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available