A hagiography is a book or long article which praises and exaggerates the characteristics of the subject and lauds his/her accomplishments. Historically it is about a saint.
I am looking for an antonym to describe Seymour Hersh's book, "The Dark Side of of Camelot", about JFK. This book intertwined truths with rumors, calumnies, unverified quotes, etc.
As far as I am concerned, Hersh's book is no better nor no worse than a hagiography.
So, how can his book be described in one word?
A hatchet job.
Cambridge dictionaries: "a cruel written or spoken attack on someone or something"
Collins: "To do a hatchet job on someone or something means to say or write something mentioning many bad things about them, which harms their reputation."
Calling something a hatchet job usually isn't praise (just as today "hagiography" is usually an insult).
Another option is "phillippic," although this more properly applies to a strong condemnation of someone. In the case of the book you cite, it seems more to be an antidote to a hagiography, restoring the unpleasant facts that hagiography omits. "Traducement" is explicitly defamatory, with a strong connotation of being false. Synography and harmatography aren't listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
I would think that the closest to the meaning you want would be "refutation," "confution," or the ordinary yet marvelous word created by the American novelist William Woodward in 1923, "debunking."
"Character assassination" is the one that springs to mind.
Other possibilities: vilification, traducement.
But these are far from a perfect fit: the "graphy" in hagiography clearly suggests a written opus.
From here I found two that I liked the look of: "synography" and "harmatography". As a pretty well educated English native speaker I'd never heard of either. Googling them reveals why, perhaps.
Are you sure you need such a word? In the title itself the author makes clear what where he is going. It does not follow that the book disregards the any saintly virtues. To be the opposite of that, it needs to indicate that the book itself is being criticised as failing to recognise the good side or as disproportionately critical.
Etymologically, the word comes from the Greek Hagios (αγιος), meaning holy or saintly, and graphō (γραφω), meaning I write. So originally, a hagiography was a writing about an actual saint. So of course they were always (or mostly) positive. So the word came to have an ironic meaning of being overly positive.
The etymological opposite, there for would be demonology which is a treatise about demons, which are the opposite of saints, assisting the d***l in the other place, the opposite of where the saints end up. Demonologies, often gruesomely illustrated, have been written in the distant past. As far as I know, the word's meaning has not so far been stretched to the ironic usage sought for in the question. But its meaning in relation to the title cited in the question would be easy to understand, especially since Camelot includes plenty of allegedly noble knights, dedicated to doing good. But it would only be valid if it merely exaggerated the dark side in an unbalanced way. If it completely ignores the noble side, then it would be the "hatchet job" suggested by Stuart F
