A disturbing, darkly funny fictionalization of the life of Fred A. Leuchter, the garage tinkerer turned execution authority who became a darling of the neo-Nazi movement, and subject of the Errol Morris documentary, Mr. Death.

He comes to fix your photocopier, but really, Fred’s an inventor. At night, he goes to work. He has goals, ambitions, and when offered the task of building a better electric chair, he jumps at the chance. People have to die—he believes in the occasional necessity of evil—but what if we could kill them more humanely?

A death specialist, first in his field but forever under-appreciated, he’s charmed when a new generation of fascists come calling for his expertise. A Holocaust denier is on trial in Toronto—could Fred prove the gas chambers never existed?

Newspapers descend. Talking heads have their say. A documentarist makes a film. Everyone will know his name, though some things society will simply not abide. Dishonoured, discredited, disgraced. But Fred’s work does not stop, and the world may yet be reminded of the dangerous truth that some men are driven by forces far more powerful than shame.

First published in 2013, this is the updated and definitive edition of Eugene Marten’s chilling masterwork of transformational historical fiction.

Eugene Marten's profile page

EUGENE MARTEN was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, to European parents, emigrated to the U.S. before the age of two, and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, after stints in Oregon, New York City, Costa Rica, Texas, South Dakota, and Los Angeles. In 2014, an excerpt from Layman’s Report earned him a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

“I am so, so grateful that Eugene Marten's writing exists. Nobody else writes like he does. What a shame! Layman's Report is full of the most strange, beautiful sentences. Marten is unafraid to look directly at the brutal things people do, but there is so much empathy lurking underneath this, too. He is a truly exceptional, one of a kind, talent.”
—Rachel Connolly, author of Lazy City

"However Eugene Marten does what he does with language is from another world. You think about the end of things, of all life, at every turn of phrase. It's not just what he renders in his characters, but how well he constructs the bleakness of the consequences the narrator faces. Like a chiaroscuro painting, Marten gently reveals what the light touches, but barely. What remains is the darkness of the story, and that is what draws the reader in."
—Elle Nash, author of Deliver Me

“Layman’s Report is a propulsive and dazzling novel—Eugene Marten’s sculpted sentences captivate with their cadence and striking imagery. Fred Junior, an eccentric inventor of death devices turned Holocaust denier and victim of his own vanity, is one of the most enigmatic characters I have encountered in contemporary fiction.”
—Babak Lakghomi, author of South