True crime was ‘rotting our brains’, ‘fetishising maniacs and murderers’, ‘cop propaganda’ and the industry was exploiting and profiting from trauma and violence. Many fans of the genre, who are mostly women, proposed that absorbing true crime narratives was empowering a way to process personal fears around misogynistic violence. Although stories of violence have been told for as long as stories have existed, since the arrival of the popular podcast Serial in 2014, true crime has exploded into a million-dollar industry comprising Netflix documentaries, prestige television shows and the top-ranked genre of podcasts amongst US listeners. It was around this time that the true crime genre lost its shine for me. There were no satisfying conclusions to discover, no motivations and no revelations to unearth. A person was gone and what was left behind was an empty space, the shape of which I could feel but not fathom. I found witnessing this metamorphosis of personhood deeply disturbing. The kind and curious person I had spoken to at a party was transformed into a cipher of speculation by strangers. I saw their face and name every day on missing posters and social media posts and local newspaper headlines. The weeks that followed were a confusion of fact, fiction and conjecture. One day they were here and the next they were gone. A few weeks later they disappeared, seemingly overnight. We sat across from each other and spoke about how our lives had changed during the pandemic, and about our jobs, families, holiday plans. The last time I saw them was at a friends-in-common birthday party. We were acquaintances with close friends in common, so we saw each other a few times a year. This long read contains spoilers for Eliza Clark’s Penance, Megan Nolan’s Ordinary Human Failings and Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence.Ī few years ago, someone I knew went missing. Is it possible to write – or read – about true crime and violence without exploiting its victims? Writer Katie Goh explores the wave of books using metafictional approaches to complicate a controversial genre.
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