Review: True Crime Story by Joseph Knox (Spoiler-Free)
I thought this was going to be an intriguing satire of the true crime genre that utilizes a meta narrative and mixed media elements, but all I got was bloated interview transcripts.
This book is meant to read like a complicated reality, one with too many angles to come together neatly, and I appreciate that idea but loathe the execution. True Crime Story is supposed to provide commentary on the ethics of the true crime genre, but it hardly does that. It succeeds at not centering its antagonist, but somehow still fails at centering the victim. It also introduces the meta concept that the author himself is somehow involved in the case, has inserted himself somewhere that we must discover ourselves. But even that element doesn't lead anywhere satisfying—it just fizzles away. And I'm aware that the nature of this story being "true" is why we aren't rewarded with an ending tied in a neat bow, but... the book could at least have given us the courtesy of not being boring.
Because when it comes down to it, that's the issue here. With no narrative, no prose, only dry, repetitive interviews, there is nothing hooking the reader into the story. Yes, a missing girl is interesting, but 400 pages worth of interesting? Unfortunately not. Does that feed into the novel's proposed thesis? Maybe. Maybe Knox is arguing that true crime isn't inherently interesting, only inherently messy.
Regardless, I was not engaged. Big bundle of blah.

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