Grindhouse Press True Crime Paperback – 14 January 2020

Good book

felt like two different books blended together. Like a book and a sequel we didn't ask for and din't match the first half. It was't my cup of tea I guess

"Well. So are you a friend, or are you a foe?""How can I know that yet? We've only just met." •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Trigger warnings: There are in depth descriptions of sexual and physical abuse of minors which doesn't make it an easy read if those are things that you can't handle. This little book is Brutal, grim, haunting and heartbreaking all in one. True crime is a powerful and disturbing read. Told from the perspective of the abused and her path to turning into a killer. This is a book I had to close sometimes because my heart couldn't handle the raw truth about inhumanity. It made me tremendously uncomfortable, it made my skin crawl and it left me with a sense of shame and anger.Samantha Kolesnik's writing in her debut novel is simply beautiful and flawless, there isn't any sugar coating in her book and look at the cover, it gives me the shivers just looking at it, like I'm reading an actual true crime story.The story follows Suzy and her brother who lived through a very abusive tragic childhood and young adult life that leaves behind so many scars and turns them into living walking monsters and you as the reader will read what's running in a murderer's mind. A part of this book about the brother left me heartbroken and crying and it made me realise how sometimes the way a person is raised and treated turns them into doing despicable things which even they can't understand because that's all they know, that's all they have been taught and lived through. Even though this book is from the perspective of an extremely angry and broken murderer, I found myself feeling so bad for Suzy and her Brother Lim. I know it's too early to say, but True Crime is now my favorite read of 2020 and maybe many more years. It's just not a story I will forget for a very long time and I'm pretty sure it will be nominated and even win the 2021 Bram Stocker debut novel award. Fingers crossed!

‘My body was my mother’s unfortunate toy.’I came to True Crime not knowing what to expect, all I knew was that it was a debut and that it was recommended by Sadie Hartmann (Mother Horror to many other people) – and that recommendation was all I needed. So I picked up my book and started reading and boy does Kolesnik weave a horrifically beautiful yarn, from page one I was under her spell and I would go wherever she would lead me… chapter one ends on a huge emotional waking nightmare, then chapter two takes off into some batshit crazy.I can honestly say that I felt battered and abused by the time I’d finished this book, but shouldn’t that be what good fiction is all about, the pain and the suffering, the no holds barred urgentness of the prose – uncensored writing which makes us feel changed. Well that’s what good fiction is for me, I don’t know about you? For me I want a book to leave a mark, I want it to transform me in some way, and True Crime left me a quivering wreck – I still can’t believe that this is a debut story and I can honestly say that this book catapults Kolesnik to the top of a must read list of horror writers today – I for one will now be picking up all her future work, I just hope that she continues to write with her unflinching taking no prisoners approach, and doesn’t become censored in any way, because her approach is needed because we do need desperately to hear and see the horrors of life.‘My flesh was a monument to bad things I wished I could forget.’I couldn’t help but draw comparisons for her brave and unflinching prose, and this brought to mind the greats such as Cormac McCarthy and with particular reflection on his novel Child of God – with its scaling intensity and creeping depravity that runs throughout (with no subject off limits) with many taboo subjects being written about – there is no filter in True Crime and Kolesnik ensures it’s all killer and no filler!Then you have the brave writing of Chuck Palahniuk – who takes the reader where they don’t want to go, but instead of alienating the reader and having them switch off Kolesnik like Palahniuk drags us through the mire and shows us in blinding clarity the things we think we don’t want to see but in seeing these things she opens our eyes to the horrors that await us (there was one scene on a farm that I thought no don’t do it, don’t go there, but Kolesnik did and I wasn’t ready, but I’m glad she had the chops to do so, because it’s this unflinching brilliance that sets this book apart from the crowd!).Then I was reminded of Bret Easton Ellis and his masterful book American Psycho in the way that he was able to get into the mind and the depravity of this escalating terror and the horrors of the human mind – something that Kolesnik also achieves with her masterful prose and unflinching storytelling.Lastly I also would make comparisons to John Steinbeck and his novel Of Mice and Men, but Kolesnik writes it with huge rabid gnashing teeth – the comparisons to Steinbeck are because of our protagonists Suzy and Lim (brother and sister) as they reminded me of the brains and the brawn of George and Lennie – and although this is horror, it’s storytelling is very very astute and crisp.We witness firsthand a childhood and a life robbed of anything safe and secure – we see the affects of abuse, child abuse at its worst, both emotional and physical abuse (it makes for painful reading but its believability is what haunts you, not the actual details – although these are hard hitting and no holds barred).True Crime is brutal and it’s prose is shockingly astute, pulling the reader into the grime and depravity of child abuse and the lasting effects of trauma. I found it also very interesting that the person carrying our these atrocities was female (and the mother), as this is something seldom seen or written about – and in facing that head on it makes for a powerful (unconventional) read, because when you hear about child abuse it is almost always referred to as a male doing the crime (or that might be just what I have been conditioned to think or believe or have made the comparisons myself). True Crime is a torch in the darkness of such emotional and physical abuse which shines a much needed light on the way this type of abuse destroys lives and childhoods and like weeds it strangles all that is good before it can sprout and flourish – choking it out, with the victim a powder keg awaiting a loose spark.True Crime is an unrelenting and urgent book. It is both brilliant and brutal – but it did have me asking the question ‘what is the true crime here’ – was the true crime the sordid details that Kolesnik has our main protagonists do? Or is it the abuse, the abuse suffered at the hands of their mother (the one person charged with keeping them safe), is this the catalyst that starts everything snowballing and like radiation slowly poisons and mutates the mind body and soul. Is the true crime here the robbing of innocence?‘The memory raped long after the person stopped.’True Crime is stunning and I couldn’t recommend a book more highly. If you are after a rabid version of Thelma and Louise, which is infused with the graphic horror of American Horror Story – but with masterfully written and deranged characters that could be from a McCarthy or Ellis book – then look no further… True Crime is horrific and I bloody loved it!

I bought this book on Brian Keene's recommendation. He compared it to two of my favorite horror novels, The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum and Survivor by J. F. Gonzalez (both of which, tangentially, you ought to read if you haven't already). That's high praise indeed, so I certainly couldn't pass up the opportunity to read this book. Having done so, I'm not entirely convinced I buy the comparison to those two books (though I do see where Keene is coming from in making the comparison), but I nevertheless found this to be a truly incredible book well worth the read.For the first half or so, I felt like the novel was, in fact, setting the reader up for an "extreme horror" experience much like the works to which it's been compared. I thought it was good but not necessarily anything to write home about. Near the middle, there's a significant jump in time, without any warning, that almost ruined the experience for me because I was completely jarred by the unexpected transition and lost my footing a bit. However, what follows is one of the deepest and most thoughtful yet unflinching looks at crime and the disturbed mind that I've ever read. The second half of this book, while not exactly fulfilling the first half's promise of a disturbing and violent exploration of human extremes, delivers something arguably much more powerful and certainly more philosophical.This is a short book, coming in at fewer than 150 pages, but those pages are densely packed with psychological insights that will stick with the reader for a long time. I read it in a single sitting because I felt not only the desire but an actual need to know what happened next, yet I also found myself pausing several times to reflect upon passages I'd just read.This isn't a happy book. In fact, it's a profoundly unhappy book. From the first page, it does everything it can to explore the elements of humanity we don't often like to even think about, but it does so with a certain delicacy that lets the reader know that while it will never shy away from the dark side of the human mind, neither does it revel in it.Read it. You'll be glad you did.