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I began a new job in October of 2014, my commute taking about 45 minutes. The perfect length to listen to an episode of Serial, the true crime podcast that catapulted the medium into the pop culture zeitgeist and the focus of many parodies. I have a distinct memory of Sarah Koenig ending an episode on a cliffhanger and me gasping “WHAT” aloud loudly, gathering stares as my bus pulled into its stop. I remember anxiously awaiting its finale and was completely taken in by the twists and turns of the case and its clever presentation. As a fan of murder mysteries, detective stories and nitty gritty details that subvert initial expectations this was all a home run for me. Since Serial took a big hiatus and its next seasons weren’t murder mystery focused, I had to get my true crime fix elsewhere.
I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I listened to My Favorite Murder for a time until it really began to needle me. Not only did I get irked with the hosts for putting on a sort of ‘dumb girl’ persona, but it felt bleak in its never ending-ness1. Looks like its up to about 450 episodes now, which is a fuck ton of murders to find, research, share and profit off of. After I began to fixate on the horrifying details of these murders while home alone and feeling more and more unsettled about the glorification of murderers, I unsubscribed. I still enjoy a true crime podcast now and again, but murder ones just hit different. I’m pretty disturbed by the true crime industrial complex that seems to have sprung up by profiteering off tragedy. Of course, this happens for allllll kinds of violence and maybe its the podcaster in me, but I feel particularly disturbed when the worst possible thing that happened to someone, and their loved ones, is humor washed and most of the attention is paid to the perpetrator. Not to mention that often this activity makes money for someone other than the victim’s family and loved ones. Just an all around gross scenario ya know? However! I did really get a kick out of the true crime parody podcast Done Disappeared where (spoilers) the podcaster’s sanity is the thing that done disappears.
Today’s theme is murder, but these books aren’t your typical murder mystery, detective story, whodunnit. They turn some of those tropes upside down and shine a spotlight on the fixation, exploitation and commodification of murder. Each has their own take on true crime as entertainment; the rabid consumption, creepy fixation and belittling way that individuals and societies can treat real horror, often for their own personal advantage. I don’t pretend that I’m holier than thou because murder stories can often be truly compelling and I sometimes feel as if, by consuming them, I somehow ward it off for myself? This is logical. And victims deserve to be remembered, but not so much their killers. Anyway, I appreciated these novels and their takes on this topic, helping me to think about my own murder media consumption differently.
Deadbolt your doors and have a weapon at the ready as you lose yourself in one of these.
MY MURDER by Katie Williams
Louise was the fifth victim of the serial killer, Edward Early, but thankfully2 she doesn’t remember her murder. Or the days surrounding it. But ever since she was brought back to life by the Replication Commission and reunited with her husband and toddler, she hasn’t felt fully herself. That is probably because she is a clone of herself, but still. Her daughter cries whenever she’s near, her father avoids her and there’s a go bag she doesn’t remember packing buried deep in her closet. As Louise attempts to return to a sense of normalcy and learn more about her pre-murdered self, her required attendance at the weekly ‘survivor’ support group, populated by the other reincarnated clones of Early’s female victims, raises more questions than answers. Adding to her sense of un-selfness is a new video game where players can play as Edward Early, stalking virtual stand-ins for her and the other victims. When she accompanies one of her fellow ‘survivors’ on a prison visit, Edward Early admits that he actually only killed four women. And Louise wasn’t one of them. So who really killed Louise and why? And are they going to try again?
This presents some fascinating ideas that invite questioning and not just about whodunnit. The idea that you are alive, back in your house and back at work but your original body is in the earth decomposing and that you’ll never truly be that same individual again and all your loved ones cannot help but see you that way, is a hell of a brain twister. The punishment for Edward Early is also fascinating in its approach to ‘humane’ rehabilitation and there’s a few other delightfully complicated quandaries presented here that could make for a fun book club discussion should you be so inclined.3
I can see this one being a bit divisive as its synopsis and marketing make it seem like a twist on the classic murder mystery, but its genre is a more of a speculative fiction/domestic thriller/dark dramedy hybrid that held more emotional heft than I first anticipated. There are themes of motherhood, identity, real world vs virtual reality, relationships and the gamification of trauma woven throughout with the postpartum experience being a special focal point. I was sucked in immediately to the entire scenario and enjoyed the mystery, quirky side characters, quippy banter and the ‘what the fuck is going on here?’ moments. Its set at some vague point in the future4 and the various technology is pretty casually mentioned without any detailed explanation so you just sort of assume, imagine and go with it. There’s also some clever formatting/presentation choices that don’t completely click until the very end so it is a fun, juicy reveal.
The ending did feel a bit convenient, not everything puzzled into place as neatly as I would have preferred5 and I wished for a bit more development for a few characters but overall I enjoyed this. It was entirely engrossing and handled some truly dark and heavy themes with a refreshingly messy, human approach; offbeat, funny, confusing and complicated without easy answers.
Angela had been the first of us. She’d been found on a park bench by some dawn jogger or dog walker, her throat slit, her sandals lined up next to her bare feet. And did you ever notice how these are the people who are always discovering the bodies, these people whose lives are so orderly that they can rise early enough to find a whole other human being dumped on the ground?
THE FINAL GIRL SUPPORT GROUP by Grady Hendrix
Where there’s a murderous psychopath on a bloody rampage, there’s also a ‘final girl.’ In the movies, the ‘final girl’ is the lone survivor of a traumatizing event where a deranged killer slaughters everyone in the vicinity, but somehow, through ingenuity, bravery or just dumb luck, one girl makes it out alive. But girls grow up and these women haven’t escaped unscathed. They’re marred by scars and traumatized by memories so they form a support group, meeting over many years to help each other process, cope and continue existing in the land of the living. Until one day, when one of their members fails to show up to a meeting and they realize that someone is hunting final girls. Someone who won’t leave anyone left alive when they are done.
I think the ‘final girl’ trope is more of a movie thing than a book thing, but that could be because I don’t read many novels about mass murder sprees. This toys with tropes in exciting and inventive ways, but be warned: this has extremely brutal violence in it. Each of our ‘final girls’ earned their status by surviving uniquely horrifying, bloody ordeals that actually made me question the mental health of the author at times. But, I really enjoy that this author often highlights overlooked and dismissed populations6 and allows them to eventually get their due though he really puts them through the wringer first. These women are middle aged, traumatized, difficult, inconvenient and extremely tough and each is different than the others making their interactions amusing and thrilling to read. Each of them has survived a murder spree and that was just the beginning of their torture. The media along with armchair detectives and ‘fans’ are all eager to consume their stories, exploit their experiences, benefit from their nightmares and then move on to the next unwilling victim. This is full of suspense, twists, turns, a terrific cast of characters and Hendrix’s signature snarky voice. Utterly macabre but somehow, still very fun.
“The final girl and the monster are two sides of one person. Think about it. One runs fast, and screams, and is resourceful, and fights for her friends. The other is slow, and implacable, and silent, and he kills, and is alone.”
PENANCE by Eliza Clark
Joan Wilson was sixteen years old, living in a small, boring beach town on the English coast when she was lit on fire by three of her female classmates. Years later Alec Carelli, a writer who has suffered both personal and professional loss, wrote an account of the events surrounding the murder after living in the town, interviewing the families and even gaining insight from the incarcerated killers. There’s no mystery of the who, but this book (within a book) explains the why of the murder. Why would three teen girls commit this truly unimaginable act to one of their peers in a poor, sleepy, nothing town? The book explores the various experiences, choices and traumas of the girls and their surroundings in an attempt to explain the murder. However, the more we learn the more we realize that these pages do not, and can not, contain the whole story.
We enter this book7 learning that it was originally pulled from shelves upon its initial release because of complaints about the author’s methods, journalistic integrity and presentation of information. Even though we have that information at the top, the book is presented in such an immediately compelling way, couched in factual sounding language and presented as a definitive narrative of events that we’re lulled into a false sense of trust. There are hints here and there of the author’s ambulance chaser character, his mysterious relationship with his deceased teen daughter and his own sordid career missteps that as readers, we can accept, dismiss, ignore or envelope into our own understanding.
The journalist Carelli uses many narrative devices in his exploration of the murder including diary entries, newspaper articles, podcast scripts, interview transcripts, historical research and, most tellingly, prose extrapolations of the internal experience of the murderers. He divides the book into a section for each girl, concentrating almost exclusively on the murderers and very little on the victim. This is so often the case in true crime media where the most interesting thing about the victim is that they are a victim while the murderers get in depth examinations and explanations. Carelli’s cheeky observations, uncomfortable reactions, unethical approaches and dogged persistence along with his completely fictionalized scenes are entertaining but also jarring as they lack journalistic integrity and flout our trust. So, we become sort of complicit with our continued attention and amusement in spite, or because, of these underhanded tactics.
This ran too long and had a few tangents that go into almost excruciating detail but I think those are a sort of satire, a highlighting of the exhaustive deep dives into extraneous details that sometimes populate other true crime narratives that probably don’t have much relevance to the murder but create an air of expertise, luring the consumer to trust the storyteller. The interplay of fact and fiction is muddled and murky, tenuous and malleable so to assume we can have any sort of true handle on an event like this is hubristic and dangerous. I thought this was a quite smart and well done take on that idea.
“I've always thought of the truth as quite a plastic thing. I admit I have no scruples when it comes to splitting hairs over tiny details, because what I'm interested in is emotional truth. I'm interested in getting across a higher understanding of a story.”
As expected with a story about murder, this gets dark. Though it includes some gory details, its darkness primarily lies in the psychology of the murderers, most especially the truly sickening internet rabbit holes they inhabit. I’d never heard of some of these seedy corners of the internet8 and now wish to forget them. But it rings true how dangerously insidious and all consuming these virtual spaces can become especially to vulnerable populations seeking something for their own and a community ready and willing to commiserate and continually up the ante.
The premise of murder and true crime as entertainment was convicting and realistic; I was often repelled by my own fascination causing me to want to interact with these types of stories (when true) differently. This feels a bit scathing to avid consumers of true crime content but also to the entertainers who mine personal tragedy for views, clicks and revenue. Overall, a disturbing novel with a unique presentation that handles all of its various narrative devices very well and leaves you questioning yourself and where you give your attention.
Do you know what happened to her already? Did you catch it in the papers? Are you local? Did you know her? Did you see it on the internet? Did some website the trawls local news for the worst details of true crimes bring her to your attention? Did you see the article about her, buried in the chum box of an already disreputable website? Did you see the red-headed stock image model juxtaposed against an edited charred corpse, captioned, "You won't believe what they did to her?" Did you listen to a podcast? Did the hosts make jokes? Do you have a dark sense of humour? Did that make it okay? Or were they sensitive about it? Did they coo in the right places? Did they give you a content warning? Did you skip ahead? Did you see pictures? Did you look for them?
Though it had a fun premise, I was entirely unimpressed and very annoyed at How to Solve Your Own Murder. It muddled up its own details, had next to no characterization, negative amounts of logic and I have a real issue when diary entries read too much like prose, keep forgetting their own formatting constraints and, most egregiously, when the reader of the diary decides to only read a portion at a time dragging out the information even though they need all of it ASAP!
I also didn’t understand Fair Play, which was two entirely separate genres and stories mushed together in a way that diluted the power of each. I think this approach would be stronger visually, where the two stories could connect more viscerally and make more sense. This was just baffling and never paid off in any understandable way.
You know what’s fun? BookTalk.
Do you have any twists on the classic murder mystery story you’d add here?
Read any of these? What did you think?
though i do appreciate and attempt to embody their catch phrase in my own life: fuck politeness
or not?
or you could just comment here.
obviously with this agency creating clones of murder victims
i’m a harsh critic though, in case you’ve not noticed
a tease for next week’s shelf
the book within the book that is
wtf is creepypasta!?!
I added all three of these to my “Want to Read” list!
And no other recs but wanted to add how I’ve been thinking about it’s been exactly 10 years since Serial (season 1) came out and I can still remember where I was when I listened to the first episodes: cleaning my closet and also gasping “WHAT” while sorting through old clothes. Then listening to the entire season with my partner on a Christmas road trip from Portland to the Bay Area. Funny how something like this will transport us back to that era of life!