Word: strangerness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...appearance of two new books to document Ted Bundy's gruesome career reminds us again that murderers are celebrities to be merchandised to satisfy our rapacious demand for the bizarre. One, Seattle Times reporter Richard Larson's The Deliberate Stranger, smacks of naked opportunism, while the other, The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rules, is mesmerized by how a man variously described as "compassionate," "charismatic," "Kennedyesque," and a "wonderful human being" could do the things Ted Bundy...
Richard W. Larson's Bundy: The Deliberate Stranger simply rehearses all that coverage again. It is less a book than a 303 page True Detective article--with none of the cheap thrills. Larson seems a dogged but uninspired or talentless young reporter responding to a hard-boiled chief detective's "Gimme all you've got"; he has lots of facts and is obviously a tireless reporter, but it all just sits there. The Deliberate Stranger isn't a book; it's the murder file on Bundy, a shapeless compilation of everything Larson knows about Bundy, which isn't that much...
...STRANGER BESIDE ME, Ann Rule encounters the same jam of corpses and cops. She also fails to make any of the victims memorable. But Rule does have an extraordinary angle that makes her book dramatic, full of human emotion, and occasionally as chilling as a bedroom window shattering at midnight. She counted Ted Bundy among her friends...
...murderer. Though Rule, like Larson, is unable to get past a snapshot description of the victims to make them stand out as individual sacrifices to the sociopath, one feels it is not because of a deadness of her moral sense. Unlike Larson's rote transcription of the case, The Stranger Beside Me grapples with Ted Bundy on human terms...
...knows? We may soon be seeing a quintet of white guys in tuxedos, singing five-part harmonies and executing some intricate steps. Stranger things have already happened...