commentary for a few of these: I’ll Be Gone in the Dark
i… very much do not like I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer, and i feel like i only need this particular passage to illustrate why. what i can appreciate about it is really limited to keeping this serial killer from recessing into history and getting away with his crimes. as an actual book, and as actual text on page, i have a lot of issues with this one! i don’t really like how it’s written so casually; i dislike how it’s presented and the jumbled order of things; i really did not appreciate[^1] the gratuitous detail of how many of the Golden State Killer’s rapes were committed, leading to such just. unbelievable paragraphs as:
Common sense, and any cop, will tell you that the no-pants rapist is an unsophisticated teenage peeper who just graduated from misdemeanor to crudely conceived felony. The punk doing the no-pants dance suffers from poor impulse control and will be arrested swiftly.
i think in general, the book reads like a jumble of blogs—and that would be fine if not for the fact that it’s a book and not a jumble of blogs. it’s a book that has been edited, and if this is what they salvaged in editing it, then… yeah. probably should have been kept in drafts overall. this solidified my general dislike of true crime
[^1]: for reasons both publicly decent and personal