Savage Appetites
Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession.
In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them.
Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Monroe's first book, blending personal narrative with sociological analysis, offers an engrossing look at a counterintuitive yet well-established phenomenon: many women's fascination with true crime. Monroe (who counts herself among the crime obsessed) focuses on four women whose true crime obsessions have significantly altered the course of their lives. Frances Glessner Lee created the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death crime scene dioramas. Alisa Statman became deeply enmeshed in the lore of the Manson murders while living in the house where Sharon Tate was slain. Lori Davis, a landscape architect, fell in love with and set out to prove the innocence of a convicted murderer, and Lindsay Souvannarath was a young woman with a dangerous fixation on the Columbine shooters. Writing in incisive, lyrical prose, Monroe takes a deep dive into possible reasons why women are drawn to tales of violence: do they seek murder stories in order to fine-tune their own survival instincts, lest they become the next victims? Or, as Monroe bravely and refreshingly acknowledges, maybe women respond to tales of human darkness because it mirrors their own ("perhaps we liked creepy stories because something creepy was in us"). Readers who have pondered their own interest in true crime stories will welcome Monroe's incisive approach to the topic.
