Dubaldhan Ghikan, Haryana, Hindistan
Ann Rule’s book about Ted Bundy, The Stranger Beside Me, is undeniably compelling and well-researched, but I don’t quite think it deserves to be hailed as a ‘classic’ of true crime. The narrative hinges on Rule’s ten-year friendship with Bundy and her initial refusal to believe he was capable of mass murder. Although this friendship clearly deeply affected Rule, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that… um… they weren’t really friends. They met as occasional work colleagues at a crisis hotline, attended a couple of social functions together and… that’s really it. Admittedly, Rule was one of Bundy’s few correspondents during his early years in prison, and those letters do shed light on Bundy, but this “friendship torn apart” angle has little truth to it. And, when Rule dramatically asserts that she feels that she had the power to stop Bundy/persuade him to confess, it really gets a little silly. That Rule inserts so much of herself into the book is understandable, but at the risk of sounding like the bitch that I am, she really began to grate on my nerves. She writes extensively of all her problems – marital problems, money problems – but she never goes into enough detail that the reader might sympathise with her. She withholds a lot of personal information, even as she’s playing up her own place in the narrative. It’s weirdly off-putting. It reminded me of listening to someone at a party tell you at length about their problems, and then, when you ask an innocuous question, having them recoil and say, “that’s personal!” (At one point, Rule talks about surgery that she had to have and there’s a good 2-3 pages about this surgery – but she never specifies what the surgery was for. I can’t tell you why this bugged me so much, but it really did. Either give me the full story or give me none of it!) It probably won’t surprise you that Stranger, which weighs in at a hefty 498 pages, could do with being 200 pages shorter. (Maybe I shouldn’t complain, though. I just got another Rule book through bookmooch and it is an astonishing 650 pages in length.) The book also has more endings than Lord of the Rings. It’s an engaging read, but definitely one to save for a time when you have a lot of time on your hands.
2020-12-29 00:11