Gary Gilmore, the infamous murderer immortalized by Norman Mailer in The Executioner's Song, campaigned
for his own death and was executed by firing squad in 1977. Writer MikalGilmore is his younger brother. In Shot
In The Heart, he tells the stunning story of their wildly dysfunctional family: their mother, a blacksheep
daughter of unforgiving Mormon farmers; their father, a drunk, thief, and con man. It was a family destroyed by
a multigenerational historyof child abuse, alcoholism, crime, adultery, and murder. Mikal, burdened with the guilt
of being his father's favorite and the shame of being Gary's brother, gracefully and painfully relates a murder
tale "from inside the house where murder is born... a house that, in some ways, [he has] never been able to
leave." Shot In The Heart is the history of an American family inextricably tied up with violence,
and the story of how the children of this family committed murder and murdered themselves in payment for a long
lineage of ruin. Haunting, harrowing, and profoundly affecting, Shot In The Heart exposes and explores a
dark vein of American life that most of us would rather ignore. It is a book that will leave no reader unchanged.
"One of the most beautifully written, moving nonfiction books published in the past five years."--
Deidre Donahue, USA Today.
"Remarkable, astonishing... Shot In The Heart reads like a combination of Brothers Karamazov
and a series of Johnny Cash ballads... chilling, heartbreaking, and alarming." -- Michiko Kakutani, The
New York Times.
"Mesmerizing...riveting and immensely moving... Shot In The Heart is a gesture of sustained courage
that just happens to be a page-turner." --Daphne Merkin, The New Yorker.