I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara Review

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark 

by Michelle McNamara

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“You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark.”

For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area. Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called “the Golden State Killer.” Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was. At the time of the crimes, the Golden State Killer was between the ages of eighteen and thirty, Caucasian, and athletic—capable of vaulting tall fences. He always wore a mask. After choosing a victim—he favored suburban couples—he often entered their home when no one was there, studying family pictures, mastering the layout. He attacked while they slept, using a flashlight to awaken and blind them. Though they could not recognize him, his victims recalled his voice: a guttural whisper through clenched teeth, abrupt and threatening. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Framed by an introduction by Gillian Flynn and an afterword by her husband, Patton Oswalt, the book was completed by Michelle’s lead researcher and a close colleague. Utterly original and compelling, it is destined to become a true crime classic—and may at last unmask the Golden State Killer.

 

For someone who loves true crime TV shows and documentaries as much as I do, I was pretty slow coming to the realization that I should give true crime books a chance. When it finally occurred to me and I began the search for books of interest, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was one of the first books I found and one of the first that stood out to me. 

Who was the Golden State Killer? 

Who was this prolific serial killer I’d never even heard of? How is he not talked about more often? How has he never been caught or identified? 

These were the questions that popped into my mind when I first read the synopsis of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and I was immediately hooked. Months after originally finding this book, I picked it up to finally read it and was once again lured in by this case and McNamara’s writing. Despite being a reader mostly unfamiliar with true crime books, I wasn’t totally unfamiliar with some of the less-than-great elements sometimes associated with the genre. The writing that can tip too far in either direction—dry and shallow, focused on laying out the facts in a way that’s cold and not engaging or writing that goes too far with adding stylistic elements, perhaps taking liberties and focusing so much on adding a sense of fear and dread to the crimes being detailed that it feels forced and over the top. As eager to read I’ll Be Gone in the Dark as I was, I hadn’t given much thought to how the writing would affect the story of this killer. 

However, I’m so pleased to say that McNamara’s writing was fantastically engaging. She laid moments out like telling a story but never dipped too far into dramatic territory. It was atmospheric and appropriately tense without feeling forced or doing a disservice to the victims whose terribly violent attacks she was recounting. In fact, McNamara was very respectful of the victims—something I didn’t realize wasn’t always the case within true crime writing until she pointed out in this book that another true crime author had painted quite an unflattering, inappropriate and rather disgusting picture of a victim in their book. How someone could find it in them to denigrate a victim of a terrible crime while trying to tell the story of that crime is beyond me but it made me appreciate McNamara’s approach more. The many victims of the Golden State Killer were well presented—they were not mere stepping stones in the large investigations of the killer’s crimes, each treated with respect and as real people. McNamara made them very real to readers, giving snapshots of their lives and their days before the attacks against them. Other people mentioned in I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—from detectives to people from her childhood neighborhood—were also captured quite well, giving us a sense of who they are from brief descriptions and interactions. 

Another aspect of this book that kept it so engaging and difficult to put down was its structure. I’d expected the most basic timeline of the Golden State Killer’s crimes in terms of layout, but McNamara made it so much more interesting by moving back and forth. She detailed the crimes, moving from three brutal murders back to when the Golden State Killer was known as the East Area Rapist, back and forth as he went from raping women to killing couples. It was all terribly horrific and frightening, but so, so compelling. The book looks at the investigations that took place as these crimes unfolded but also included input from the former detectives who are still hung up on finding this killer today. McNamara even goes into her own investigation, her discussions with former detectives and online crime boards where people try to work through cold cases, as well as detailing the origins of her own interest in true crime. It’s fascinating and compulsive, an absolute page turner. 

However, as much I as didn’t want to put the book down, there were several times I really needed to. As I said before, I enjoy watching true crime shows. I’m certainly no stranger to listening to the details of brutal crimes and frightening masked intruders. You’d think I might’ve grown something of a thick skin about this stuff over time but I have certainly not. I’ve wondered if true crime books could scare me more than the typical horror novel and the answer is YES. Yes, they can. McNamara included details from the crimes, including quotes from the killer recalled by victims, that sent chills down my spine. I’ll even admit that I had trouble reading this book at night. Sure, my imagination ran a bit wild but credit must still be give to McNamara’s depiction of these crimes and this killer. This book was fact filled but still had a narrative style without reading like a badly dramatized version of events—yet her words still managed to conjure such images in my mind that I had to put the book down. It was fantastic. 

Throughout the whole experience of reading I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the interest of the case and excitement as you feel investigators and McNamara may be growing nearer to discovering the identity of the Golden State Killer is tainted by a sadness regarding the fate of this book’s author. Michelle McNamara died suddenly while in the middle of writing this book and still investigating the Golden State Killer. While the pieces of this book are picked up by others at the end, it still feels as though it’s been cut off at the knees. The ongoing investigation into the Golden State Killer has lost a major force and though it’s impossible to have an idea of where I’ll Be Gone in the Dark could’ve gone had Michelle been able to finish it as she’d intended, it’s difficult not to imagine that she could’ve played a major role in finally identifying the Golden State Killer. With all the work she put it, she certainly made a dent in this investigation and helped bring more national attention to it all these decades later. 

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark was a well written, incredibly captivating book. It was more fascinating that I’d expected and, though I had to put it down sometimes to avoid scaring myself too badly, I didn’t want to stop reading it. I highly recommend it to all fans of true crime. 

4/5

Do you enjoy true crime books? Does I’ll Be Gone in the Dark interest you? Let me know what you think in the comments!

Thanks for reading, 

Madison