True Crime

Something is very wrong with me.

(This isn't news to anyone who's been reading my blogs or who has met me, or even, really, seen me in public).

I go through these phases with regard to what I'm reading. I tend to enjoy nonfiction lately much more than fiction, as it seems lately I can't find anything to read that moves me enough to want to pick it up every night before bed. By 'moves me', I mean either makes me laugh so hard I start peeing my pants (has happened more than once), or cry like a little bitch, or get so frightened I have to throw the book across the room and later hide it where I can't find it again (also happened once. But I was smoking a lot of pot at the time). Anyway, maybe my threshold for being really affected has gone way up...maybe I'm desensitized (probably...too much porn)...but it seems like life is too short to waste time reading things that don't really do things to you.

Hence, my love affair with true crime.

It all started one winter when I was on vacation in the Adirondack mountains. I wandered into a used book store (sadly, these establishments are getting less common these days...I hate the thought that my daughter might not ever get to experience the sheer giddiness that comes from the smell of thousands of well-worn books waiting to be re-dog-eared and inhaled and savored) and picked up a few things that I thought might be fun to dive into in front of the roaring fire (note: the cabin I ended up renting had one of those gas-powered portable fireplaces, which totally ruined the effect). One was an old paperback of The Stranger Beside Me, Ann Rule's memoir of her friendship with a handsome, gentle young man who would later be known as one of America's most terrifying serial killers: Ted Bundy.
Oh, shit. It was SO ON.

From Bundy I moved on to Diane Downs, the narcissistic serial surrogate-mom who shot all three of her kids point blank in the back seat of her car and then blamed it on a black guy. I read about wives killing husbands, husbands killing wives and unborn children, hell, I even went through a Jonbenet phase (short-lived, thank god). I just could.not.get.enough. To this day I continue to I gulp down biographies of Charles Manson and Richard Ramirez and John Wayne Gacy without taking a breath.

Then just like that, I can't do it anymore. I'll stop. I'll get myself so freaked out laying in bed with a twisted, horrified look on my lips, only kindle light to keep me from falling into total terrifying blackness, and I'll say, OK Kristin. You're cut the hell off.

And like the junkie that I am, I'll go cold turkey. I'll jump right into Fifty Shades of Grey or the Sookie Stackhouse series, anything polar opposite, whatever it takes to clean the creepy off.

But I always, always come slinking back. Head hung in shame, I take a resigned breath and once again commence reading something that will continue to crack open the enigma of the human mind gone wrong...I'll float in the sensory deprivation tank of true crime writing until my skin is metaphorically wrinkled with it...I'll continue to drop down into the bowels of mankind in the hopes of somehow figuring out what moves me.