The second thing is Damien Hirst’s remarkable cover. A smiley face on a bed of churned earth. No prison portraits. Happy Like Murderers.

The third -- hold the book side on -- is that there are no pictures, no photographs of the house. No blurry photobooth images (are these treated by the papers? or do the victims have them taken in case?) of the vertical shafts. Not of the torture implements. Of the makeshift graves he dug to bury the dismembered corpses. Of the things happy Fred built. The videos the couple made together.

Happy Like Murderers is not True Crime. There are plenty of others if that’s what you want -- Wansell, Masters, Souness. Gordon Burn's book doesn't report on the crimes of 25 Cromwell Street; it’s a narrative. Take any page at random and it could be a page from a novel. Burn writes with a novelist’s eye for detail, for rhythm, for cadence. And character. This is not a book of statistics. He uses repetition. Endlessly.

Fred West -- we know Fred West, we’ve seen pictures -- isn’t mentioned until page 24. And then only because his story connects with Carol’s. The first three chapters of Burn’s book are spent telling us about Caroline. About her tough life, about the way it lead her, almost naturally -- like a novel -- into the orbit of Fred and Rosemary. But she survived. She escaped. Twice. She tried to narrate what was happening inside that house but few listened. She was possibly the only person in the country (the West children included) who, when Heather West’s body was discovered on 26 February 1994, wasn’t surprised. They did terrible things to Carol. But they didn’t kill her. Burn explains.

It’s not a trick, though. It’s not a narrative device to feed us into the horror. Burn wants us to know Carol because Burn wants us to understand the victims. He doesn’t show us their graves, because their graves are not who they were. What do we know from the other books, the acres of newsprint? Maybe what they looked like, how old they were. Statistics. They were people to whom things were done. Their deaths defined them. Burn wants us to know that their deaths, finally, were the very least of them. And if he cannot write the book that tells us their story, then Carol will speak for them, because she still can. Happy Like Murderers is a book about criminals, not their crimes.

The details are here, mind. Burn tells us things we would rather not hear. Unlike, say, Dennis Neilsen, who understood the practicalities of disposing of his victims, Fred West delighted in it. It was the next part of the process: rape, torture, kill, dismember, bury; live with his victims in his house, under his house. He filmed, killed: kept. He took bones away with him. They have never found those bones. The Happy Murderers kept all their letters, bills, scraps of paper boxed in the attic at 25 Cromwell Street.
A graveyard at the bottom of the house... A museum at the top of the house. The scraps of their lives carefully kept and preserved. A museum of themselves.

It’s the details you remember. Not the big picture -- that’s much too big -- but the pieces of a jigsaw that you can hold in your hand. That Fred West didn’t like loud music. That he liked film background music. The music from porno movies. Feature-length hard core. There is something even more horrific in that -- the horror of banality -- than in what follows. In what Fred West did with his belt. In Rose West’s love of being lashed to a five-bar gate, whipped and screwed in the lights of Fred’s van. The horror of banality.

To understand, he is saying, you have to understand how they lived day to day; how their kids lived day to day. How Fred West charged his house, his family, his job with sex. How to him everything was erotic. Pornographic. That’s what you have to understand. ‘Your first baby should be your Dad’s,’ he told his girls. Showing a daughter what sex was was ‘a father’s job’. Her virginity was his to take. Fred was obsessed with his house. His tools. His tools for making. His tools for destroying. His -- their -- victims were never ‘her’ always ‘it’. ‘If he couldn’t think about sex he couldn’t think at all.’

Their happy empire collapsed, Burn suggests, when Fred’s sexual stranglehold slipped. When he killed his daughter Heather for reasons other than sex, he weakened the house of cards. Even Rose turned against him. His prison suicide had all the hallmarks of Fred West: the obsessiveness, the collecting, the construction. He picked the most sexual method of suicide for himself.

This is an astonishing story, told in an astonishing way. With integrity, with compassion. It does not indulge in True Crime’s pornography of pain. For the time you live with Burn’s book, you live with Fred West, with Rosemary West. And it is difficult not to conclude that, while you do, this really was the most terrible place on earth.