Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker

I heard about Kill Show by Daniel Sweren-Becker on a podcast and I was intrigued by the premise, so I ordered it from the library and read the whole thing on the way to Iowa for Thanksgiving. I was absolutely riveted. 

First of all, this is a novel. It's a novel about true crime, but it's a novel, nonetheless. It references actual occurrences in the world, but it's not real!  I read a handful of Goodreads reviews that said this was shelved in non-fiction and I don't know how that would happen since novel is on the cover, but it is what it is, I suppose.

A girl goes missing in a Washington, D.C. suburb. A television producer flies in from California and starts a reality show following the girl's family around in the immediate aftermath of her disappearance. This book is the story of what happens in the investigation and the television show, told in the style of a documentary where each page is the dialogue of what people would be saying if you were watching that show. I thought this format was perfect. I also appreciated that the author put in parenthesis who the person was after their name each time they spoke. It made for less flipping back to the list of characters at the beginning of the book.

I thought it was smartly done. I know that I would probably watch a reality show that was following a crime in real time, even if I had some serious ethical considerations about doing so. I thought that the ripple effects of the television show that Sweren-Becker created felt true to what would happen. I thought the social commentary was spot-on.

I was also really invested in what happened to this girl. How could she literally just disappear so quickly? The internal story was mesmerizing.  

I have a few quibbles, but if this format would be appealing to you and you think about the social ramifications of true crime as a genre, I would highly recommend this one. 4.5/5 stars

This is just an example of how the book is formatted. (page 12)

Lines of note:
Casey is a wolf in wolf's clothing. (page 28)
I'd never heard this phrase before and I laughed really hard when I read it. My husband tells me it's a common phrase. Have you heard it before?

There's nothing like getting a teenager trapped in a car, it's the only place you can really bond with them. No eye contact, some music on the radio, a little boredom - your kids just crack wide open. (page 109)
I 100% always try to have difficult conversations in the car because of the no eye contact thing. 

Hat mentions:
None

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa by Michael Finkel

 

In 2002, Michael Finkel was fired from his job at The New York Times when it was discovered he had used interviews from several children to create a composite character in a news story about the slave trade in the coffee industry. The NYT went through all of his other stories and could find no other examples of misattribution or falsehoods, but he was nonetheless promptly fired.

Meanwhile, a fugitive named Christian Longo was using Finkel's name as an alias while he was on the run in Mexico. Longo's wife and three children had been found murdered and Longo was the primary suspect. When Finkel found out about Longo using his name, he wrote to Longo in jail and thus began their relationship based on letters, phone calls, and occasional visits. 

True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa is the journalistic result of this relationship. It is said that the authors of true crime have to either betray the audience or betray the subject. Finkel tries very hard to do neither, but in the end, he cannot write about Longo without doubting every word Longo says, while at the same time realizing that his own hands are not clean with regard to truth telling. Finkel goes out of his way to corroborate every word Longo writes to him, but some things are not verifiable, and, in the end, Finkel must conclude that Longo is a lying liar who lies.  

But is this a true mea culpa? I struggle with this. On one hand, while I see what he did with the composite character in his article was unethical, I honestly don't think it was *that* bad. So I don't know if he really needed to have much of a walk of shame. On the other hand, if you think what he did was the worst offense ever, I don't think this book is going to change your mind. He accepts that what he did was wrong, but basically hides behind an excuse of "my editor made me do it." 

The book is mostly about Longo, not about Finkel. Since I actually find Finkel's story more interesting (look, I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts, including a couple about the Longo case, so what can a story about yet another family annihilator tell me?), I was a tiny bit disappointed in the direction of the book. I also can see why Finkel didn't necessarily want his own story to be entangled with that of a mass murderer.  

It's an interesting story, but not really the story I wanted. 3/5 stars

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry

People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry is going to fulfill the "true crime" prompt for the 2018 Read Harder Challenge. I'm actually quite into true crime. I listen to a lot of true crime podcasts (Casefile, Criminal, and In Sight are good places to get started if you're interested in this genre) and I must admit to perusing through the UnresolvedMysteries subreddit over breakfast most days. So, this prompt was not actually a tough one for me and was one of the very first Read Harder challenges I took up in 2018.

This book follows the story of Lucie Blackman, a young woman from the UK who disappears in Japan while working as a "hostess" in the Roppongi neighborhood of Tokyo.  Parry is diligent in his research. He does super deep dives in to the various roles of strippers, waitresses, hostesses, and prostitutes in the kind of seedy Japanese area where Blackman worked. He tells us all about Blackman herself, as well as her family. I know more about the tension within the Blackman family than I know about that of my own. We get a minute by minute account of Blackman's disappearance and learn about the impact her disappearance and the later discovery of her body has on her siblings and parents. We learn about the man who would later go on to murder Blackman and at least one other woman, as well as his family.

It's all diligently laid out in a super organized fashion.  The amount of time and energy taken to follow this case, from the search through the trials that lasted over a decade, must have been enormous. It's a grueling read and sometimes hard to think about what people are going through even now.

But in the end I have two major beefs.

1) Why? Why did Parry follow this case so closely? Blackman doesn't seem that compelling a character and young women who are involved in the sex trade industry, however tangentially, are of course going to be more vulnerable than most.  Blackman wasn't even the only woman from the UK who went missing in Japan during the time period covered. I'm not saying that Blackman's story doesn't deserve this retelling, of course it does, but I just want to know more about why Parry himself found this case to be the one that would turn into his true crime opus. It's a case that's rather run of the mill in true crime circles, which doesn't mean that it isn't an important story that needs to be told, but it needs more explanation as to why it's important.

2) What does the title mean? Who are the "people" and what is this "darkness"? At first, I thought that there must be more than one kidnapper in this case, but it turns out that Joji Obara was a lone actor, so that doesn't make sense as an explanation. Is it the people involved in the weird Roppongi sex trade? If so, shouldn't the focus on the novel be on clearly motivated sexual crimes (it's not clear if Blackman was sexually assaulted or not)?

Neither of these things made me dislike the book, but I just am a bit confused about its purpose.  

If you're a true crime fan, you should definitely read this, but if you're not on the true crime bandwagon, there are probably better entries out there for you to read.