"I can’t stop thinking about memory and what a wonderful and terrible thing it is. Wanting so badly to remember a moment doesn’t mean a thing, but neither does fervently wishing to forget." -- Me, on a blog post ten years ago.

I've only ever dabbled in true crime. Perhaps that feels surprising to anyone who has ever heard me wax poetic about my comfort media, as procedurals are my chicken soup. More and more, for me, that admission comes with a little duck of the head, a hand up in silent apology, an acknowledgment; I know how often these stories rely on an overly simplistic portrayal of carceral justice. Many of them thrive on the idea that the system works, that the bad guys lose, and that the good guy is, in fact, the one with a badge and a gun.

It's been the work of unpacking my own taste to understand that what attracts me to these stories, even now, copaganda notwithstanding, is the fantasy of justice, perhaps particularly in grossly unjust times. There is a neatness in fiction that can soothe my anxiety-addled brain and satisfy my well-developed sense of justice.

Not so much in true crime. While not all subjects of true crime stories are unresolved, they all, understandably, feel messier to me, even as they try to force a narrative arc onto the non-linear chaos of human behavior. No matter how they might try with their beginnings, middles, and approximations of an end, they leave behind frayed edges.

Like many my age, my one big experience with true crime was the first season of Serial. It was very much appointment listening, the subject of which was to be the center of many water-cooler conversations, online debates, and group chats. I was right there with everyone else, eagerly awaiting the next episode, thinking it would be another piece of a puzzle I consumed like a story.

Instead, Serial left me haunted. The blog post I wrote about it a decade ago was, of all things, an emotional reflection on the failure of memory—a worrying over the things I've lost over the course of living and the things I desperately wanted to forget.

Perhaps these frayed edges are what attract others to true crime. They are gaps where you, relatively safe and snug in your home, can seek the kind of truth that is inventive and flexible. That is less like truth and more like imagination. That, well, maybe, isn't truth at all, but it sure feels like something close enough.

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"Even short lives are complex and rich. Even dead children are full of contradictions and flaws and mysteries that will never be fully understood or solved." -- Penance, Eliza Clark

I read Penance on the recommendation of my Discord. I'd glanced over discussion of it and filed it away as something I would get to eventually. Truly, all I knew about the story was that the Discord friends who read it and had a Tumblr era had big emotional responses.

With so little frame of reference, it took me a moment to get my hands around the shape of Penance— to understand that Clark wasn't just telling a straightforward mystery but layering an exploration of how stories are shaped both by those who tell them and by those who listen.

I'm not usually a reader who gravitates towards books where knowing less about them might mean enjoying them more, but with Penance, that was exactly the case. Up until the very last moment, Clark challenged me as a reader. She pushed the boundaries of what I expected from a story about crime and guilt. She wasn’t interested in providing answers or pointing fingers; instead, she forced me to sit with the ambiguity of human behavior through complex and well-voiced characters.

Ultimately, I walked away from this experience thinking about consumption, particularly how we sometimes disguise consumption as pursuits of greater moral value. The more we follow Carelli, the journalist main character, the more we understand that his investigation is less about truth and more about consumption—his and ours.

I wanted to know what happened despite the fact that we started the book with the answer. I wanted to know the details. I wanted to understand the why until it satisfied my own sense of narrative so that it might also satisfy my own sense of justice. Clark masterfully arranged her story so that I might become part of the very thing she was critiquing.

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In the center of the complicated nexus of adored and hated, desired but also easy to watch being destroyed, it had to be a Black woman. -- Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

Penance left me thinking about work in which the audience becomes implicated—mirror work, if you will, or if you are pretty online, "Is this play about us?"

Naturally, I have to yet again mention one of the best books I've read over this past year, Chain-Gang All-Stars. There is a kind of complicity baked into the premise and structure of a book about mass-distributed violence. We are also watching and in a way that invites us to think of our complicity in current, non-fictional systems of exploitation and suffering. The violence we watch unfold in the novel mirrors the real-world systems of oppression, where Black bodies—especially Black women’s bodies—are commodified, both adored and destroyed for entertainment or societal gain.

If you look at some of Chain-Gang's three-star reviews, you'll see that relatability, interest in, and closeness to the characters are often-repeated critiques. Of course, those are valid criticisms of any work of fiction, but I can't help but find it ironic and rather heart-wrenching how these critiques mirror the very themes of Chain-Gang All-Stars. The desire for more depth, for more humanity from the characters, seems to overlook the fact that Adjei-Brenyah is exposing a system that deliberately dehumanizes and commodifies these people. It overlooks the way white supremacy has embedded into society a relegation of the stories of Black folks as less relatable. The system in Chain-Gang All-Stars is designed to make these characters disposable and to make their pain and struggles palatable for an audience that thrives on violence as entertainment.

I'm not saying that every critique of Chain-Gang is purposefully doing this. I'm saying that it takes a kind of unquestioned consumption to read a story of Black and Brown folks, fictional as they may be, bleeding for the entertainment of the masses and somehow come away from that thinking they could've bled more. It feels too close to what I've experienced as a Black woman moving through the world.

And it's rather genius, really. It at least shows me that Adjei-Brenyah knew what he was doing when he wrote a story in which he would involve and implicate the reader.

I think that here, we have to also mention The Hunger Games, a kind of spiritual predecessor to Chain-Gang All-Stars. This idea is even more well-defined via The Hunger Games, especially for those of us who remember the commercialization that happened around the movie.

From the 2013 Cover Girl Capitol Collection. Slay, queen.

The Hunger Games hit a kind of pop-culture saturation that had the added symptom of taking it further from its original written context while exposing it to bigger audiences, for better or for worse. This dystopian series was, at its core, a searing critique of capitalist exploitation, media sensationalism, and systemic violence, now with bonus action figure and a real working bow.

This is not to say that books should not be adapted or critiqued. I also don't want to get stuck in a logic loop here. These are all fictional stories that did set out to communicate effectively to their audience within the accepted parameters of a novel. Enjoying these works, being invested in their characters, and being drawn in by their spectacle is also the point.

My point is that this is indeed part of their brilliance. In Penance, our hunger to know forces us to reckon with our role as readers. In Chain-Gang All-Stars, our investment in spectacle makes us want more depth and pain for our entertainment. And in The Hunger Games, we can villanize the Capitol while consuming just as they would have.

If you can think of any other works that feel this way in their implication and critique, let me know in the comments! I haven't been able to stop thinking about Penance since I read it, so apparently, I enjoy society being read for filth fiction.

♥️

Marines