Book Review — "True Crime" by Samantha Kolesnik
When I first read the plot synopsis of Samantha Kolesnik’s True Crime, I thought I was in for another rehash of the Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate story, the real life teenagers who went on a killing spree across Nebraska and Wyoming in the late 1950s, murdering eleven people. Now, there’s nothing wrong with there being yet another rendition of the notorious case. I mean, I could always use another Badlands, Kalifornia, or Natural Born Killers in my life, to be morbidly honest. However, this book is not that. True Crime by Samantha Kolesnik is its own beast.
Kolesnik does not mess around, not for a single sentence. Right from the beginning, I had something in common with Suzy, our adolescent protagonist. Suzy will likely speak to the countless former youths—and I was one, too—who found themselves intrigued all things gruesome and macabre from an early age. For me, it was ghastly horror films. A naked David Kessler tearing off his sweaty clothes and transforming into a hairy werewolf thanks to Oscar-winning special effects was my jam. For Suzy, it’s true crime. Gory crime scene photos stir her. Seeing a picture of a strangled blonde babysitter “aroused an excitement in” her akin to “a young boy seeing his first centerfold.” Okay, Suzy, okay…
The language here is very direct. You won’t find fluffy, superfluous descriptions of things that don’t matter to the main storyline. Because Kolesnik crafts with a dramatist’s pen. Her words strike to the core, immediately, especially when it comes to holding a mirror up to the darkest parts of our fractured humanity. To put it another way, Kolesnik does not fuck around. Given how tightly constructed this narrative is—and how precise the author’s writing is—I would not be surprised if this novella began as a screenplay, or at the very least was outlined according to screenplay structure.
Kolesnik’s sense of character is also quite strong. So much of what we learn about Suzy is revealed through action—the choices she makes. For instance, Suzy’s decision to bite back against her abusive mother and kill her, while leaving an innocent girl behind to die in the process, is the shocking inciting incident of this tale. A ballsy move on the author’s part—but not merely edginess for the sake of being edgy—because that life-altering decision informs the reader of exactly whose journey we’re to follow for the next 100+ pages. Suzy may appear monstrous, but Kolesnik maintains Suzy’s humanity by lending her human contradictions: hardly batting an eye while murdering and dumping the body of a woman, then feeling outraged at the sight of a boy harming a defenseless animal. She’s often terrible, yes, no doubt. But she’s a person, scarred and capable of doing what the most terrible people do.
We also learn a lot about Suzy via her first-person outlook, rife with erudite determinations about this perverse world we live in. “I came to realize cows were docile creatures and therefore it didn’t surprise me men killed them in droves. / And it didn’t surprise me there probably wasn’t any joy in it,” being maybe my favorite elucidation about toxic maleness and its proclivity for acts of wanton violence against vulnerable populations. Suzy’s reflections would make for perfect snippets of voiceover in what would ostensibly be a neo-noir film.
The most fascinating character in the book, though—to me, anyway—is Suzy’s troubled brother Lim, who accompanies her on this road trip of full of bloodshed. Lim is perhaps the most difficult person to size up, as a young man who does not express himself liberally. He’s a strongbox of emotions and feelings that you know are there, deep down, locked away… But ultimately he’s expressively self-entombed. So while Suzy is very forward, Lim is withdrawn and mysterious. It’s clear that he’s damaged, too; Suzy was not their mother’s only victim. But since we’re denied his point of view, we don’t quite know all the horrible details, just enough hints to connect some dots, just enough to get why someone as reticent as Lim would go along with his sister’s killing spree. They’re a perfect duo, dramatically speaking.
As twisted as it is, this is the kind of brutal coming-of-age story I wish I’d had in my teen years. Naturally, I was an odd kid who was into weird stuff that my friends’ parents wouldn’t even let them think about, things my family never felt the need to shield me from. I never really thought of myself as an outcast because of my interests, but I suppose I was. I simply figured I was more mature than my peers, and I suppose I was that as well… And although I’ve never had the inclination to go on a murderous rampage—and although I’ve always had a pretty decent relationship with my mother—teenage me would’ve been drawn to Suzy nevertheless. And this book as a whole. Because True Crime is disturbing, probing, and brief—three of my favorite adjectives. And I, for one, am very eager to read Samantha Kolesnik’s next tour de force.
