Shot in the Heart

Shot in the Heart
by Mikal Gilmore

Shot in the Heart
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Book Summary Information

Author: Mikal Gilmore
Edition: Library Binding
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1995-08
ISBN: 141771090X
Publisher: San Val

Summary of Shot in the Heart

Mikal Gilmore comes from an extraordinary family, a family haunted by death, brooding on violence and fixated by its own legends. His brother was the murderer, Gary Gilmore, shot to death by a firing squad in Utah in 1977 and the subject of Norman Mailer's subsequent novel and film, "The Executioner's Song". By then his eldest brother had already died of alcoholism and stab wounds and the third brother was to disappear over the horizon, his fate unknown. It is possible that his brothers' fascination with lives of violence was inherited from his mother's fears. Bessie Gilmore believed that the family was haunted. She was taken as a child to witness a public hanging of a murderer, and the event fascinated and terrified her for the rest of her life. She believed that public killings unleashed the demons of the hanged murderers and that these demons flew from the gaping mouths of the dying men into somebody in the crowd. It was her belief that such a spirit had sprung into her. This a real-life family saga, but it is not only about violence and death. It is also the story of how one son preserved himself from his family and the emotional cost of remaining separate from them. This son is the author of the book.
"I have a story to tell. It is a story of murder told from inside the house where murder is born. It is the house where I grew up, a house that, in some ways, I have never been able to leave."

Mikal Gilmore is a Rolling Stone writer and the youngest brother of murderer Gary Gilmore, who became, in 1977, the first person to be executed in the United States after a 10-year hiatus, a case which was subsequently recounted in Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song. This brave and eloquent book is the story that only Mikal Gilmore knows: the violence in multiple generations of his family, what the Gilmore house was like as he was growing up, his relationship with his brother, and his experience of the dramatic events surrounding Gary Gilmore's determination to be executed as planned, without appeal. Shot in the Heart pulls off the rare feat of conveying intense emotion without sentimentality or self-pity. The author's struggle is to set himself apart from the lurid true-crime fraternity of his father and brothers yet remain able to understand why he feels both guilty and lonely over his exclusion from his family's violent history. --Fiona Webster

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