What an absolutely wild book. Admittedly, I have never really engaged much with true crime. I don't mind reading about scary or gruesome things in the context of supernatural horror or sci-fi/fantasy, but when it involves things that actual humans do to one another, it tends to give me nightmares. But that said, I am absolutely not immune to the exact phenomenon that this book is criticizing, of being much more invested in learning all of the little details about why a perpetrator acted the way they did and what REALLY happened at the expense of the humanity of the victim. I found myself towards the end being like "okayyyy all this setup, what actually happened the night of the murder??!" and while the narration of it certainly didn't disappoint, I'm reckoning in hindsight with why I felt such a compulsion to know those details.

I loved the structure of this book, where it starts at the outset with telling you all of the allegations against the "author" (that is, the in-universe author, not Eliza Clark) and the details of the crime, which you almost immediately set aside as you get swept away in the detailed storytelling and world-building that is being described. I also really enjoyed the blending of real-world facts and cases with fiction; I definitely was doing a lot of googling while reading to be like "wait did THAT happen irl??" And of course, the description of online spaces is so spot-on, and I'm often unusually sensitive to incorrectly timed pop culture references.

Definitely not one of my "fave ever" books, but absolutely one that I will be thinking about for a while.