"This is the most important, and disturbing, book ever published about the IRA. It is the first, unsparingly detailed account of the reality of political violence in a small country divided by rival ideas of nationhood. No book has ever documented so compulsively the dreadful cost of an unwinnable guerrilla war." "More than three thousand people have died in Northern Ireland since 1969. Most were killed by their neighbours: by people from the same rural area of small farms and quiet roads, or by people crossing the sectarian frontier that divides one street from another to deliver a burst from a gun." "What very few outsiders can imagine is how young men (and some women) get into a state in which the murder of a neighbour becomes thinkable, and how they then go about it, so that killing becomes normal, becomes the most important thing they do." "Killing Rage is a terrible, unusual book because it reveals the squalor, vanity and anger, the sheer smalltown intimacy of political killing in Northern Ireland."

"No paramilitary 'volunteer' has ever told the full story of what he has done for his cause. Eamon Collins is different. Not only is he, by his own immensely detailed account, responsible for five killings, but he planned many more. His 'South Down Command' (though, on this occasion, he was not personally involved) was partly responsible for the largest massacre of RUC men in the history of the state, when nine constables died in a mortar attack on Newry police station. Not himself a trigger-man, he was in some ways more cold-bloodedly responsible than the actual killers, for he was the 'Intelligence Officer', the man who spotted, tracked and arranged the murder of the local IRA's victims. He would spend months planning such killings; and in one case, the victim was a colleague of his in the customs service, whose children Collins had met. He is also unusual in his ruthless honesty, being the first ex-activist willing to expose so truthfully the banality and tragic waste of 'the armed struggle'. He offers the reader an irreplaceable portrait of how anger becomes politicized and channelled into the service of revolutionary nationalism: of how it becomes 'killing rage', in which terrible things are rationalized, such as the murder of lone, elderly RUC men a few months away from retirement simply because they are easy to hit; the blowing up of telephone engineers who happen to be members of the Territorial Army; the shooting of men who serve part-time in the UDR. And how dreadful 'mistakes' such as the killing of a harmless Catholic mistaken for an RUC detective, or that of a ten-year-old boy by a car bomb in a small town, come to be reckoned against the greater good of Irish freedom."--Jacket.