I’m going into this review knowing full and well that I have an unpopular opinion on I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. I’ll just go ahead and kick it off here:
I did not really enjoy it.
I love true crime. Seriously. It’s so interesting. Michelle McNamara was me at heart. She completely lost herself in trying to figure out who the Golden State Killer/East Area Rapist was. Unfortunately, at her time of death, they still hadn’t caught Joseph James DeAngelo. Thanks to the modern desire to know everything in life, he was found through one of those ancestry websites.
In addition to writing a book without a real resolution (since the killer hadn’t yet been found), Michelle McNamara died unexpectedly in the middle of drafting the book. Thus, and this is why I didn’t enjoy the book, it felt very haphazardly connected. In fact, I lost a lot of connections. For some chapters, you focused on one crime scene. There were others that bounced around. Some were titled with a year of a crime, but had characters in the present day.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from this book. My brother in law really loved it, so I had high hopes! I wanted to be creeped out. I wanted to FEEL the fear and terror those in California felt when the GSK was at his peak. That sounds awful, but that’s how deep I want to get into a story.
There was one paragraph in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark that actually chilled me to my core:
It was a power play, a signal of ubiquity. I am both nowhere and everywhere. You may not think you have something in common with your neighbor, but you do: me. I’m the barely spotted presence, the dark-haired, blond-haired, stocky, slight, seen from the back, glimpsed in half-light thread that will continue to connect you even as you fail to look out for each other.
I sent a text to my brother in law that it took me until page 185 to feel the fear that I wanted for the rest of the book. Would I recommend that you read this if you love true crime? It depends. If you want facts and trails, yes, it’s great for that. If you want to share the feelings of those who lived it, no. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark did not achieve that for me. Again, it’s likely an unpopular opinion, and it broke my heart to not love it.
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