Year: 2025

I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK by Michelle McNamara

This book is about a journalist’s fixation with a particular serial killer, the Golden State Killer. A very prolific offender, he committed 13 murders and more than 50 rapes over about 15 years. Curiously, despite this, he was not especially famous. This journalist, Michelle McNamara, spent a large amount of time with people she met on internet message boards, and with the police, researching the case and trying to solve it, and this is her account of her fixation. In the end, he was not caught by any of this work, but by genealogical DNA. She was important not because she solved it but because she drove interest in it, even giving him the name the Golden State Killer.


Two things struck me about this book, the first being how awful it is that in fact serial murders are completely capable of stopping. This one did. Their crimes are not compulsions, but choices. This makes it much worse. In this case, as the offender was a police officer, they think he stopped when he became aware how powerful DNA was.


The second thing was that the book was not finished by McNamara. She died part way through, in her sleep, from an undiagnosed heart condition mixed with prescription medication. It was sad to see the second author trying to find a way to end the book from her scribbled notes. It reminds you you do not know the day or the hour. In any case, the Golden State Killer was caught a few months later.

SUMMER OF BLOOD by Dan Jones

Here is a piece of non-fiction about the Peasant’s Revolt in 1381. I’d never heard of it. Apparently after the plague, there were so few working people that they were able to up their day rates, which the nobles didn’t like. Hilariously, they therefore tried to fix prices at the pre-Plague rates. In addition to this great idea, they were also busy trying to rule France by means of an expensive war, and decided that peasants should accept the introduction of taxation to pay for it.

This did not go down well. Inspired by a priest called John Ball, who was basically miles ahead of Marx with the communism (and from who the famous line “When Adam delved and Even span, who then was the gentleman?” comes), the peasants marched on London, killed a lot of nobles who deserved it (and some who potentially did not), and took the Tower of London. Richard II, then fourteen, granted them all their demands, and the revolt started to ease. So then he set up vindictive kangaroo courts and had thousands of peasants executed in revenge. Rich people got to rich I guess.

THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim McQuarrie

Due to being an insufferable swot I always like to read a book from a country I am in when I am in it.  Thus THE LAST DAYS OF THE INCAS by Kim MacQuarrie while I was in Peru.  This was some hair-raising non-fiction.  I knew very little about South American colonialism, and now I know a little more all I can say is YIKES.  These sixteenth century Spanish were intense.  However so also were the Incas. 

Basically the tiny amount of contact the Incas had had with Europeans had spread smallpox, which the Inca Emporer (Sapa Inca) died of.  This triggered a civil war between two of his sons, and when I say a civil war, I mean the winner (Atahulpa) aimed to exterminate his brothers whole blood line down to hanging the unborn babies BY THEIR UMBILICAL CORDS.  Then the Spanish turn up.  There were only 163 of them, and Atahulpa had a victorious army in the tens of thousands.  So you can see where he was not worried.  He went to meet them the day after he found out his brother was dead, so he was really finally the Sapa. He was mostly just interested in seeing the horses, as they did not exist in his Empire and he saw how valuable they could be.  They immediately kidnap him.  Poor guy: one day as the Sapa.  So unconcerned was he about the capacity of the Spanish (who he thought were strange savages, which is of course exactly what they thought of him) that from his prison he ordered the continued execution of senior figures in the Inca opposition, instead of – for example – asking them to rise up and save him.   You can see where he is coming from: there are only 163 of them!  But what he did not bargain on was that they had iron.  I guess I did not appreciate the importance of iron, but it meant that their armour made them basically invincible, especially with the horses.  

It just gets worse and sadder from there on all sides.  These Spanish were not representatives of the Crown but really just independent entrepreneurs, who risked their lives on the chance there was gold somewhere out there in places they did not even know existed yet.  Pizarro, the main one, grew up really poor, as did most of the others. I guess you need to be really desperate to get on one of those ships.  I got the impression that these were some seriously traumatized people before they even left Spain, and it went downhill from there.

There are about a million more things I learnt, like how the Incas kept everything the Sapa touched (eg., left over food) and burnt it once a year, or how the Sapa executed a whole batallion once for flinching the first time they saw a horse, or how this poor 19 year old the Spanish put in place as a puppet emperor grew into a guerilla leader, or how his wife was tortured to death in public but shamed the Spanish by not saying a word, but anyway I guess you will just have to read it.  

It was strange to read so much history while in a country.  I had a coffee in a central square about which my only context was that 3000 Incas died defending it.  

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison

This novel is about a girl born to a 14 year old waitress.  The waitress has a big family, who help her with child care, so it is a lot about that family.  It is kind of an uplifting story of small town life, until the waitress marries a man who starts sexually abusing the child.  The child eventually tells an aunt, so the mother removes them from the man; but then he ‘promises’ not to do it again, so they go back.  The mother tries to make sure they are never alone together.  Great solution!  Then he rapes her really brutally,  and the mother walks in on it.  The child goes to hospital, but her mother DECIDES TO MOVE TO CALIFORNIA WITH THE MAN (!?!).  

This just seems so awful as to not really be believable, but I’m sorry to tell you that apparently this is a lightly fictionalized version of the author’s life.  To be fair, her mother never actually left her, but she did make them all live together even once she was aware of the ongoing abuse.  He even gave her an STD, which left her permanently infertile.  Sounds like a gruelling read, and it sort of was, but it also wasn’t, because I guess of the courage of the author, who has rebuilt her life with amazing courage.  I learn from the Introduction that the book has been banned from schools on many occasions. I know that people who make sure bans like to claim they are protecting children, but I think we all know who this actually protects.  

There was an interestng line to a character recently bereaved: Now you look like a Boatwright.  Now you got the look.  You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl.  This is the way you’ll look until you die.  

FELICIA’S JOURNEY by William Trevor

A very compelling story about a young Irish girl who gets pregnant and comes to England to find the father with whom she had a holiday romance. She doesn’t find him, but she does find what we slowly conclude is some kind of SPOILER ALERT serial killer. This makes it sound like it’s cheesy, but it’s really not. Trevor is a really gifted writer and tells the story from both POV in a very compelling way. My main take away is, THANK GOD FOR FEMINISM. This poor girl is so messed up that she really is barely able to advocate for herself in even the most basic ways, and that’s before she meets the serial killer.