A True Crimey Time of Year

A lot happening on the true crime front these last few weeks. First I got my contributor’s copy of The Best True Crime Stories of the Year 2025, which includes my polygraph essay.1 That piece will now probably find a bigger audience than any essay I’ve ever written; if I’d known that, I might’ve done some things differently, but so it goes.

Then I did a panel on writing about gun violence at Arizona State’s creative writing conference. I got to present with a group of other writers who think deeply about the same sort of things I do, which rarely happens and was a real honor, despite the dark subject matter.

And yesterday, an episode of a true crime podcast I appear in came out. Hush, an Oregon Public Broadcasting podcast in its second season, came to campus last year to visit my class. Afterward, I talked with the creators, Leah and Ryan, about true crime, journalistic ethics, our responsibility to victims, and so on. It was a great conversation. I’d been teaching and critiquing true crime for a long time by then, and had written a book that’s partly about the origins of the genre, but it was so interesting to talk with people who actually make it.

I’d met Leah before, and was a fan of her latest book, Blazing Eye Sees All, a brisk and deeply reported story about a cult leader and a lucid critique of new age movements. (She also has an excellent Substack.) And I’d been a longtime fan of her and Ryan’s work ever since I binged the whole first season of Bundyville on a star-crossed drive to Reno years ago.

There are way too many true crime podcasts. For the most part, the genre is a sewer. Hush is a rare exception, and I’m not just saying that because I was in it—I liked the first season so much I taught it in my class. Listen to an episode and you’ll see how much care, thought, and sheer investigative legwork go into its making. I was honored to be a part of it, and am eagerly awaiting the rest of this season.

I’m pulling every string I can to bring Leah and Ryan back to campus for an event later this year. Stay tuned.

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Some recommendations:

• At the Drive-In. It’s a documentary about a drive-in theater, not my favorite band in 2000.2 I first heard about the movie when I started watching the director’s YouTube channel. I know how that sounds. Trust me, watch it. It’s short. It’s free on Kanopy and other places. It’s so good. And he made the whole thing solo for five grand!

• I’ve been a fan of Jessa Crispin’s work since the days of Bookslut, the sui generis literary blog she founded.3 But I’d somehow never read any of her books until this month, when a friend loaned me a copy of Crispin’s The Dead Ladies Project. (More info and an excerpt here.) It’s her first book, which is hard to believe, because it’s, for lack of a more elegant term, so fucking good. Like her shorter pieces, it’s acerbic, funny, iconoclastic, and fearless. But the book form gives her more room to also be a person on the page, and Crispin has a rare ability to synthesize the personal and critical and do both equally well, transitioning between the two modes so artfully I often didn’t even notice. It’s also possible that I like this book so much partly because we have a lot in common, much of which I didn’t know until I read this book. Crispin and I were born two years apart, both grew up in small rural towns in nowheresville—the exact same size towns, in fact—both owned Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet on cassette tape in our white-trash youths; we’re Cancers; we’ve both been to St. Petersburg for White Nights and had near-death experiences in lawless Russian taxis.4 Not a lot of people like us make it into the literary world, and I’ll always root for the ones who do.

• Big fan of Crispin’s podcast, too, which I’ve recommended here before.

• This Beth Nguyen essay is fantastic, and that magazine looks slick. It’s a shame it’s the last issue.

• Alex Cameron’s new single. I hope this means there’s an album coming; I wore out Oxy Music a few years ago.

• Still can’t stop watching Montessori Boy.

• The new Geese album. Skip the first song.

• The Netflix series Adolescence. Not sure I liked it quite as much as everyone else did; the single-take conceit wears thin by the second episode. The acting’s spectacular, though, especially Stephen Graham.

• Same with One Battle After Another, which like ten different people recommended to me. It was entertaining and well-made, probably the best film I saw in a theater this year, but not all that memorable.

• Speaking of Pynchon—One Battle After Another is loosely based on his novel Vineland—I adore this quote (found via this Substack post) about my hometown, which encapsulates a lot of what I tried to say about in my first book, and also about my favorite Tombstone book, Oakley Hall’s Warlock, which Pynchon once formed a mini-cult around:

Tombstone, Arizona, during the 1880’s is, in ways, our national Camelot; a never-never land where American virtues are embodied in the Earps, and the opposite evils in the Clanton gang; where the confrontation at the OK Corral takes on some of the dry purity of the Arthurian joust. Oakley Hall, in his very fine novel Warlock (Viking) has restored to the myth of Tombstone its full, mortal, blooded humanity. Earp is transmogrified into a gunfighter named Blaisdell who, partly because of his blown-up image in the Wild West magazines of the day, believes he is a hero. He is summoned to the embattled town of Warlock by a committee of nervous citizens expressly to be a hero, but finds that he cannot, at last, live up to his image; that there is a flaw not only in him but also, we feel, in the entire set of assumptions that have allowed the ­image to exist.

• Lorena, the 2019 documentary series about Lorena Bobbitt, was much better than I expected.

• This Johnny Freirson record, especially the first track.

• Will & Harper. This felt more like a collection of great moments than a great film. I don’t love Netflix documentaries—they’re like airport books—but the conceit and characters are so compelling, plus it has Will Ferrell.

• I got a random work email a few weeks ago from a composer that said his new album was good for listening to while working. If you send me an unsolicited piece of writing—or a whole book, which happens more than you might expect—there’s no chance I’m reading it. But send me music and sure. He was right. I liked it. I’m listening to it right now: