The latest pro wrestling book to hit the shelves, “Ring of Hell: The Story of Chris Benoit & The Fall of the Pro Wrestling Industry,” is one sure to ruffle some feathers. It’s an extremely hard-hitting look at a complex industry in which performers die young, promoters get rich and broken families are the norm.

Unlike some other books of its genre, however, Matthew Randazzo peels back the deeper layers of a nearly impenetrable business that the author describes as its dysfunctional, sadistic underbelly. The book is compelling and controversial, no doubt, and if you’re a devotee, it probably will make you cringe at the very least and even question your sanity for being a follower.

Randazzo himself claims to be a longtime fan, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find any remotely sympathetic characters in this book. “Ring of Hell” is a heavy-handed indictment of the wrestling business, and the author pulls no punches about it. Then again, he’s not trying to win any popularity contest, and he leaves it up to the reader to make his own judgment concerning the book’s more startling and scandalous revelations.

Fans of the wrestling business will experience real shock and awe with this knockdown, drag-out page-turner.

If the title of the book isn’t enough to hook you, the ominous opening quote from the central character surely should do the trick.

“The world (of wrestling) doesn’t push you to the depths of darkness. You do. That drives me nuts ... It’s not the world of wrestling that drove (troubled wrestlers) to alcohol, the world of wrestling that drove them to drugs. You do that to yourself.” — Chris Benoit

The book, appropriately enough, was released on the one-year anniversary of the biggest and most tragic story to ever hit the wrestling business. The industry was shaken like never before when Benoit went on a gruesome weekend killing spree that claimed the lives of his wife, his 7-year-old son and himself.

Randazzo paints a sick and destructive picture of an industry he contends turned Benoit, a seemingly normal and kind family man with unimpeachable character, into what is described as “a brain-damaged, ogre-faced drug addict.” The 5-foot-8 Benoit, a small man in a big man’s world, was willing to sacrifice his health and his life for a cheap pop. And, if mangling and mutilating his body was the price for fame, so be it. Life without wrestling, it seemed, was no life at all for a man like Chris Benoit.

IN OTHER NEWS: